This Mind Is Not In Service

           When I first wrote about my shift in consciousness and the discomfort and difficulty I faced (see The ACIM Mentor Articles, Volumes 3 and 4 as well as A Memoir of Christ: A Student of A Course in Miracles Awakens, here), some readers thanked me in a way that implied I was somehow “taking it for the team.” I took this to mean they felt I would save others the same difficulties, and I could only imagine that would be through sharing my experience as I was. Or perhaps they felt I was serving all by playing my part in the Atonement (as is everyone). I felt, however, that their gratitude was unnecessary, as I did not feel I was going through those experiences and sharing them for anyone, not even for myself. The idea of service of any kind was stripped away in the very process in which I found myself.

Since the shift, I have come to understand that consciousness (time, existence, appearances) is what A Course in Miracles calls the Atonement, or the expression of the instant of the idea of not-God arising in God’s Mind and simultaneously being undone. So, my experience of the world has only ever been an expression of that instant, it was not to bring it about. There is no I separate from the whole Atonement to somehow serve the whole. The whole expresses itself through this mind’s experience of a person, which this mind merely watches as it passes by. This mind may seem to make choices, but it does not truly do so. What feels like its choices are the Atonement expressing through it. Any process or action or event, like the shift in consciousness, that this mind finds itself in is the Atonement expressing through it.

This has always been the case. Ego was the sense that this mind somehow had free will and could make choices apart from the whole. But in the end, I see ego was only a story that this mind was thinking, feeling, acting apart from the whole. This mind and person moved as they were moved, and whether I went along with the movement or resisted was just a story in my mind that seemed to make a personal identity for me and seemed to be independent from the whole. So, the concept of service belonged to ego.

Of course, my experience of ego-consciousness was also part of the expression of the Atonement, as is yours. It moves out of this mind, and whether it moves out of yours, is part of the Atonement.

It was as though I thought I was an isolated ripple among other isolated ripples in a stream but came to see the stream as a whole and how each ripple is the stream. But I could only see this because I came to see I am neither the ripple nor the stream, but rather the air above, experiencing the stream passing under me. 

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