About Responsibility, Choice, and No Private Thoughts
When you dream at night, you are never actually in the dream. All the dream figures are in your mind. One figure may represent you but is not actually you. You are the dreamer dreaming, which means you are only watching the dream.
And so it is with
consciousness. It can be likened to one dream with one dreamer where none of
the figures in the dream are the actual dreamer, although all are in the mind
of the dreamer, and some may come to represent the dreamer. So spiritual awakening
means becoming aware that you are the dreamer of the dream and while consciousness
occurs in your mind you are never actually in consciousness.
The spiritual practice of
watching your mind is meant to open you to the possibility of your mind
slipping past its preoccupation with consciousness—the thoughts and experiences
of the person—to the recognition that you are not the thoughts and experiences,
and you are also not the thinker or the experiencer. You are merely watching a
thinker/experiencer, consciousness, the dream. You are the dreamer of the
dream.
When A Course in Miracles
says you are responsible for, or have chosen, what happens in the world (in
consciousness, the dream), it is not speaking to a person, a dream figure. It
is speaking to the dreamer of the dream. The dream figure’s story line is part
of the larger story line of the Atonement, the theme of consciousness, the dream.
And that is predetermined as the idea of not-God was over as soon as it arose.
So, when the Course says you are responsible or that you have made a
choice it simply means “this is occurring in your mind.”
The Course says there
are no private thoughts and that your belief that you have private thoughts is
an illusion. This is not an invitation to share your person’s every thought,
but an invitation to recognize that your persons thoughts, feelings, and
actions are not separate from consciousness (the dream) as a whole, but rather
are expressions of consciousness as a whole, just as the thoughts, feelings,
and actions of figures in your dreams at night are all part of that one dream
in the mind of the one dreamer, you.
Remember, no part of God has ever left God, so no part of God must return to God. Therefore, an appearance of separation from God and the undoing of separation from God can only be a dream, an illusion. And, as part of God, you can never be in that dream, though you may dream that dream.
“You are at home in God, dreaming of exile but perfectly capable of awakening to reality.” (T-10.I.2)
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Comments
Helen
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Gardens are filled with little things of God
That sing and twitter in a tiny voice,
And flash from blade to blade across the grass.
They shine with morning, and they glow at night,
And through the daylight wind and hum and turn,
Wheeling among the flowers as they live
Their little lives, and then they disappear,
Yet when they enter in eternity,
They will be part of God along with me.
T-12.9;
T-12 IV
You can have real awareness of this prior to vision.