God’s Thoughts Are Real
As we each continue to discover more truth on our path, we bounce around less among the unreal identities about who we believe (or believed) ourselves to be. We discover more of ourselves as we discover more truth. We recognize ourselves when we remember what is truthful, and not built upon illusion. So many of us – myself included – have a hard time distinguishing what’s real and what’s not, especially in ourselves. So many things we feel or have learned, we think we are, but this isn’t necessarily true. When we practice “vigilance,” as A Course in Miracles (ACIM) states, the picture becomes clearer. We don’t need to go do the same things we once had done in order to get the same results we once had in how we feel of ourselves. God’s truth is larger than our ego’s vision. We think that doing the same thing is what gets that same result, but there’s a layer beneath that draws out the spirit within. And it’s not our doing or our identity that necessarily brings our spirit out in what we do.
When we are not feeling how we want to we are quick to determine what we need to go out and do to fix how we feel. While we’re in this state of mind, we are then recognizing in the moment that we are in a state of untruth. We have a hard time recognizing ourselves in these states of lack because the lack we feel usually brings about the question, likely producing more lack. We tend to automatically address our feelings of lack by either affirming them and validating our victimhood, or whining that we are not where we are supposed to be in our growth. Either conditioned approach offers us no salvation and freedom from illusion.
Essentially, when we recognize that we are in a state of illusion, we deal with fear more effectively. At the early levels, we cope by comforting ourselves with ice cream and chocolate. (Heck, ice cream is for any time.) As we become more advanced, we recognize the thoughts of untruth/fear/negativity as quickly as they enter our minds as thoughts, and we become instantly aware that an untruthful thought of ourselves has entered our minds. So we awaken to our mastery by choosing differently. No matter what we are dealing with, there is truth in it. The layer beneath our awareness is what remains true in us, whether or not we are confused about our mastership. Our mastership means that our free will can not be violated because God gave us freedom. We are thereby able to entertain any thoughts we wish, even ones that are untrue and keep us in pain, and separated from ourselves, each other and Him.
We transition so often and we continually size up what we are experiencing with the truths we have come to know about ourselves – about what we are. The real fireworks happen when we encounter something more truthful than what we have come to know about us. It can be liberating and inspiring to uncover a truth about us that we hadn’t before recognized. It can also be disconcerting for us when we discover an untrue idea about ourselves which we’ve thought prior as a truth and we had been professing innocently or insanely in an unconscious effort to preserve it.
All we know about ourselves is what we have experienced of ourselves. It’s interesting to me how ‘resistance’ and ‘acceptance’ tend to be characteristics of our relationship with truth; meaning, what we will accept or not accept. Is it so presumptuous to say that we don’t know the truth? We do know it – but do we choose it? We so often compare doctrines and details, defending or projecting even the doctrine-less ideas, that it can be easy to miss the simple and silent spiritualism of using the feelings we have to learn truth, instead of abusing the feelings within to project untruth - fooling others but mostly ourselves.
Let us be “vigilant” as ACIM states, to the awareness of what is true in our thoughts and what is not, and let us experience embracing who we truly are by choosing God’s thoughts instead of defending our illusions and believing we know more about ourselves than He does. Our spiritual expansion is a simple result of which thoughts we use to decide who we are. We are God’s thoughts. His thoughts are real, and all power is of God.
c2007 TSchaefer
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