Uncovering Hidden Forms of Delusion

            It can be hard to describe the nuances of how one’s mind works, but I’m going to try here in case this can be of help to someone else.

I’ve long been familiar with recognizing a triggered ego. This goes way back to when I was first a student of A Course in Miracles almost 40 years ago. I will describe something that will be familiar to many of you: I would be at peace at home while studying and meditating, but as soon as I walked out the door, I would lose my peace. I wanted to blame the world, but it was obvious something had triggered ego in me. Of course, over a long span of time, I learned, through various stages, to bring peace with me as I interacted with the world, and I was triggered less.

But there was something else going on with ego that I only discovered recently. It began in my twenties, after I had become a student of A Course in Miracles, and after my first foray into Spirit-consciousness, the “honeymoon” of the Period of Undoing. After the peak of that time, peace and joy were with me for a while and then seemed to dribble away as ordinary life seemed to take over. But now I know some of it had been left behind. It’s tragic, really, because for decades I was deliberately stepping out of Spirit and into ego in certain circumstances without recognizing what I was doing. It would go something like this:

I would be snugly tucked into a soft place in myself. Then it would come time to interact with the world for one reason or another and I would slip into a hard place in my mind to “deal with reality”—by which I did not mean the Reality of God, but “the hard facts of the world.” I considered the snugly soft place in me to be a kind of “numbing out”, an understandable, but ultimately immature, dysfunctional response to a harsh world that would “bite me in the butt” if I didn’t “buck up” and “face reality.” I certainly did not recognize the soft place as Spirit.

This came about because it had happened on occasion that, in fact, I would be in that soft place and the harsh reality of the world would come along and “bite me in the butt.” So, I had come to see this leaving the soft place for the hard place to deal with life in the world as a wise pre-emptive protection.

This did not occur every time I had to deal with the world, only when I had been in a particularly soft place in myself. Of course, it is obvious now that this was ego protecting itself, not me. There is no objective world, harsh or otherwise, outside of me. The hard place in me to which I turned to “deal with the harsh world” was the harsh world. It was ego. When I was previously “bitten in the butt” it was not by the world, but because I had unconsciously turned to ego, and ego projected the source of my pain on circumstances in the world. And the first step in this, was declaring the world a reality apart from God that I “had to face.”

As I advanced spiritually, I tried to bring Spirit into “facing the harsh world”, but of course this didn’t work because I had already unwittingly left Spirit to go to ego’s world! I saw this as a mysterious ongoing failure.

I missed that the soft, snugly place in me was true peace because when peace first comes, it comes to a deeply conflicted mind, and there is a stark contrast that makes peace easily recognizable. After a while, peace becomes integrated and is not so easily distinguished. It also was not what I was expecting, as for so long I expected peace to come to ego. So, by the time I realized that was not how it worked, I had for so long accepted that expression of peace as a dysfunction that I continued to take this judgment for granted and didn’t look at it.

I became aware of it recently, however, when a mysterious experience that I have had on occasion ever since this mind shifted to Spirit-consciousness four years ago became clear. The experience was a stark sensation of “Where have I been?” as though some part of me had been gone and had returned to find things had changed in its absence. I thought maybe it was parts of this mind “waking up”, joining my new awareness, but these moments would go by so fast I could not be certain. Until a few weeks ago, when I discerned that this was ego suddenly poking its head through my new awareness, trying to “come back online.” And I recognized the similarity of this sensation of “returning” to leaving the soft place in me (Spirit) to go to the hard place and “face the harsh realities of the world.”

So, for so much longer than I knew, I was, very often, not just in touch with Spirit, but in Spirit, in this soft place in me that ego said was a delusion. Well, of course it did. To ego, the pusher of the delusional belief that consciousness is reality, Spirit is the delusion. So, as ego is undone, these hidden forms of the actual delusion push their way up to conscious awareness.

 

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If you have a question the answer to which you feel may be helpful to others, send it to Liz@acimmentor.com and I will answer it in this newsletter/blog.