The "Evidence" For Truth

My wife and her friends play role-playing games, online and in person. They create elaborate fantasy worlds and if you overhear them you hear how real their characters (avatars) and fantasy worlds are to them. Years ago I had huge judgments against this. There was one friend of hers in particular that I judged as immature and unable to deal with life. He “hid out” in these fantasy worlds. I couldn’t just release these judgments so I realized I must be projecting. I was willing to look at my own thoughts and beliefs with the Holy Spirit (Awareness of Truth in my mind) and what came up out of the depths of my subconscious mind was, “How is this any different from what you do with A Course in Miracles?”

Whoa…what???

Here was the ego’s (personal thought system’s) total unawareness of Truth. Of course Truth is not real to it because it is the opposite of Truth and cannot understand Truth. But my projections of judgment meant I held its lack of awareness of Truth as my own doubts about Truth. In dark periods of severe doubt I’d listen to the ego explain away my spiritual experiences and fear it was right. For example, it would say that my Revelations and higher miracles were just the result of random chemical or electrical changes in the brain. It would mock me for thinking that certain “convenient” thoughts were the “Holy Spirit”. It would tell me that I was just an anxious person who could not cope with life so I had to “hide out” in a fantasy of another reality that I called “Truth”, etc. It could be quite vicious and frankly convincing.

“Faith” is not a word I’ve ever liked because for me it has the connotation of “blind faith”, which means believing in something without evidence. And “belief” is just an intellectual acceptance of ideas anyway. Faith and belief were never enough for me. But trust is different. Trust comes naturally through experience. Trust is not something that one can fake. You either trust or you don’t so pretending to trust (blind faith) is extraordinarily stressful. And I felt I deserved more than just “faith” or “belief”. I didn’t want mere ideas or the stress of pretending. What I wanted was evidence so I could trust. If Truth is true, I reasoned, there has to be evidence of It somewhere in my experience so I could learn to trust It.

Agonizing episodes of doubt eventually resolved when in time a quiet knowing returned. But when I found I feared that the ego was right about Truth being a fantasy I realized I needed more. I needed irrefutable evidence. But where? I went through my experiences of Truth and found that the ego was right that everything could be explained away...Except for one thing: The transformations that had occurred in me since I began the path to Truth and inner peace. Putting aside the experiences of Revelation, higher miracles, and everyday miracles, which the ego could explain away, there were huge shifts within me that could not be explained. I had peace, confidence, detachment, and a deep sense of security in always having the Answer with me. But there was no one working on me. So there was Something working in me. And it wasn’t what I had always thought of as “me” because certainly I had never worked hard at the process. I had done a lousy job with the Workbook. I was a terrible meditator. I never reached a quiet mind or a transcendental state. I was inconsistent and rather lax with any practice. I spent most of my time, in meditation and throughout the day, in ego. Where I did work hard on myself is not where transformation ever came because I was always focused on the wrong things: the ego and the self. When peace came to me it came apart from them, which was so unexpected to me. So much of the path unfolded in ways I never expected or imagined or even knew was possible. I had no idea what in my mind needed to be done and where in my mind it needed to be done to be at peace. So I could not possibly have caused the transformations I’d experienced with what I had always thought of as “myself”. My only contribution to these transformations was willingness for them to occur. And this willingness was not my submitting my will to someone with a stronger will to transform me. Not only was there no such person but how would they do this anyway since the transformations were within me? It had to be that there was Something within my mind beyond the body and the ego that is untouched by them but transforms my experience of them and myself when I am willing. This was the “evidence” of Truth that I could trust.

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