Choices Are Expressions, Not the Means to An End

          When the person here, Liz, was seventeen, she came out to herself as a lesbian. She’d had romantic and sexual feelings for girls and women all her life, but she’d developed a heterosexual persona to keep the truth from herself and others until she could handle it. Coming out was an identity crisis, a very difficult psychological and emotional process of personal identity shift from the personally false to the personally true.

So, when a couple of years later, she learned that God was within and that her True Identity was in God, that it was already here, and that ego was a false identity that had to fall away, she felt she had an advantage. She felt coming out was a template to follow.

But it turned out that the coming out experience was a parallel, not a template for enlightenment. Because where in the coming out experience the “I” of ego stood between a false heterosexual persona and an authentic homosexual orientation and seemed to have a choice between them, there is nothing to choose between ego and Spirit. The movement of ego and Spirit in consciousness is an expression of the Atonement—the theme of consciousness.

The “I” that went on a spiritual journey was ego. The “I” that went through that identity crisis and other shifts in self-concept was ego. The “I” that felt it was a “decision maker”, choosing between ego and Spirit, was ego.

When A Course in Miracles says, “You are doing this (painful thing) to yourself” it is speaking to ego, not to an entity beyond ego that has chosen ego. Only ego wants ego. Only ego experiences ego’s pain. When consciousness experiences ego, it registers ego’s experience of ego just as when consciousness experiences Spirit it registers Spirit’s experience of Spirit. Ego and Spirit never intersect in consciousness. That’s why the end of ego’s journey in consciousness is the end of ego, not ego’s transformation into Spirit.

Consciousness is the vacillation of ego and Spirit, of dark and Light. Consciousness is shaped to ego, so this vacillation is made into elaborate personal and collective stories. These stories seem to be the means to an end, some sort of attainment, perfection or heaven or whatever you want to call it. But consciousness is an expression of the moment of the idea of not-God appearing and simultaneously being undone by God’s All-encompassing nature (the Atonement). So, what consciousness expresses is over. Consciousness is not going somewhere. It expresses the past.

What seems to be your life is an elaborate story laid over the vacillation of dark and Light, ego and Spirit. What seems to be your choice for Spirit is Spirit moving forward in consciousness, shaped into a story. What seems to be your choice for ego is ego moving forward in consciousness, shaped into a story. Neither the movement of ego and Spirit nor the story bring something about. They express a moment, a moment an impossible idea appeared and was simultaneously seen to be impossible. This is why they are called illusions. 

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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 indicate that you want it answered in this newsletter/blog.

Comments

Suzy said…
Thank you for sharing your coming out story and the comparisons with the Course. You have such a gift explaining the Course in language that we can understand. I am currently reading the text chapter by chapter with our ACIM group and at home reading your translation in plain English which makes an enormous difference. Feeling grateful!
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