Spirit’s Plan of Love or Ego’s Plan of Sh*t? ACIM Lesson 135

January 6, 2022

How to Rock a Miraculous Body: ACIM Chapter 8-VII | The Body As a Means of Communication

January 20, 2022

I’m Responsible For What I See? WTF?

I have heard the concept that we make our own reality since I was about 8 years old. My mother was a student of Truth, New Thought, and metaphysics, and being her daughter, I was intimately familiar with the idea that our thoughts have the power to create.

But it wasn’t until half a century later that I finally got it.

If your life is not reflecting what you want to see in certain situations, there’s a really good reason for that, and there is also something you can do to change your experience.

A Course in Miracles teaches us that we have asked for all that we experience in our lives. It says,

“I am responsible for what I see. I choose the feelings I experience, and I decide upon the goal I would achieve. And everything that seems to happen to me I have asked for, and receive as I have asked.”
T-21.II.2:3-5

That statement used to totally piss me off, producing an argumentative inner-teenager reaction in me. It went something like: “Are you kidding me right now? Seriously? I did NOT ask for negative experiences! I didn’t ask for sickness, for heartache, for financial lack, for loss of loved ones, for conflicted relationships! WTF? How can you even say that? That is so unfair! I know what I asked for, I know what my prayers have been, what I have said affirmations about, what my vision boards have looked like, what intentions I have set. They were the opposite of those things! This is BULLSHIT!”

Yep, even growing up in a Unity church, with a New Age, metaphysical mom, practicing visualization meditations in Sunday School and manifesting parking spaces during grocery shopping trips; after decades of studying metaphysics, including Divine laws such as the law of attraction; even after being a student of ACIM for many years – as well as a teacher, minister, and counselor of its philosophy – I still found myself having that response.

But fortunately, because my ACIM practice has been developing my ability to smell my inner bullshit and discern it from the Truth, I was finally able to really get it. As I look back at the way things have gone in my life, I see with much greater clarity that what I believe establishes what I expect, and what I expect is what happens.

What I hold in my mind as a belief is what ends up playing out in my life in the world. Every time. Period. The End.

So, I went on a trip with several friends a few years ago, and as much as I was looking forward to it, I also had a lot of anxiety and fear of the possibility of events unfolding in a particular way based upon past experience. In particular, when I have hung out with two other people I’ve often ended up feeling left out and /or ignored, and believed that they preferred one another to me. It just always seemed to go down like that. I had no trouble one on one, or in larger groups – but threesomes were always problematic.

I worried about this prior to my trip, and hoped things would be different. But in worrying about it, I set it in motion. I had the expectation. I gave the thought power and ended up making it my experience.

Something on the trip occurred – I couldn’t really even identify what – that triggered my old, fearful belief, and I began to allow those anxious thoughts and fear-based expectations to take hold in my mind. Kind of like, “See? I’m being left out. They like each other better than me. This is what always happens to me.”

And my mind responded by firing up all of those tired-ass stories of what happened on previous occasions, gathering all of its “evidence” of how things were going that way again, and abra-ca-fricking-dabra, my immensely powerful creative thoughts manifested into reality! There I was in tears, all boo-boo-kitty, feeling unimportant, not included, not wanted, unloved, and that something was wrong with me.

Thankfully, my Course-based muscle-memory eventually kicked in and I was able to begin a practice of forgiveness of my perception of others and the situation. I asked to see it differently. I asked for healing of my mind.

As I did this, things in my experience immediately began to shift toward the better. It became very clear to me that I had made the whole thing happen with my fearful beliefs, which had located me in a consciousness of fear. From that place, my experience of the world had become the one I was most afraid of, because that was the lens through which I was looking. I expected to see it and so I saw it.

It had nothing to do with the people I was with, or how I was being treated, or whether people wanted to be with me or not.

The epilogue to this story is that after I returned from the trip, a memory came to me. It was something that I had heard my mother say to me and about me many times during my childhood. From as early as I can remember I heard that I always had trouble playing with more than one friend at a time, because I never had siblings close to my age, so “someone always ends up feeling left out.”

Someone? Really? (I’m pretty sure I’m “someone”.)

So I’ve dragged that belief around with me for almost a lifetime – and, shock – that’s what happened in my reality.

Remembering that was amazing in its ability to affirm and validate for me that I have the power to reprogram that belief system, and thus change my future experiences! (Now of course I feel like I need to go on another vacation – like, next week – you know, just to practice.)

But what usually happens to us when a fearful belief manifests into our experience? Instead of being able to see it from the empowered point of view of having adopted it and thus having the power to change it, we instead project it outward, looking at everyone and everything as the cause of our problems, dissatisfaction, pain, mistrust, difficulty, hurt, conflict, and lack of peace.

But it is not everyone or everything. It’s us. It can really suck to hear that – like, right out loud, I get that – hence my original rant mentioned in the beginning of this post. But the reason we resist it is because our ego minds take it on as guilt that we did this to ourselves, and it is the guilt that we can’t tolerate, and so we project it onto others.

In fact, it is our unconscious guilt over our belief that we have separated from our Creator – not that we ever could in reality, but that we believe that we have – that causes us to torture ourselves by creating these painful situations in the first place. It is our attempt to punish ourselves for something that we never did, but that on an unconscious level we absolutely believe we are guilty of.

But guilt is a choice we don’t have to make. We can choose love instead. We can choose forgiveness, and be willing to see it differently. We can hear those victimized thoughts as a reminder, a warning bell. As A Course in Miracles advises us,

“Beware of the temptation to perceive yourself unfairly treated.”
T-26.X.4:1

As soon as we become aware that we are having an experience we don’t want, we know that we are in the process of constructing it with our thoughts. As we tune into feeling crappy, we can decide to choose again. It is in that moment that we can say the shortest, simplest forgiveness prayer the Course provides us with –

“I will forgive and this will disappear.”
W-pI.193.13:3