Seeing Replaces Ego's Judgments

          In my memoir, I spoke of a long phase of having no comfort when nothing in my mind was familiar. The personal identity was gone. Something of ego remained, but it seemed generic and was awful, like nothing I experienced before, which I now know to have been insanity as I came out of the delusion of personal identity (ego). And I no longer had Spirit to “call on” as Comforter, Teacher, or Guide because I was Spirit!

Yet, I had no idea how to be Spirit. Seeing had come, but I didn’t trust it when it involved the material world. Only much later, when I was writing my memoir, did I realize Seeing would have been my comfort if I could have consistently trusted it.

Seeing, as I use the word with an uppercase “S”, is Spirit’s perception. And what Spirit Sees is Its Self.

At its highest, Spirit Sees the Real World. The Real World does not involve the material world at all, like Seeing the Golden Light of Love. This is the purest Seeing of my Self. This I did trust, but it occurred infrequently.

At its lowest, Spirit Sees what is to occur at the material level. This is what is often called intuition or even psychic abilities. How is this Spirit Seeing Its Self? Spirit knows It is All That is and so what appears is made from It. It is not Spirit’s Creation, as A Course in Miracles uses that word, by which it means Extension. But what appears is Spirit’s dream and Spirit knows this. This intuiting and foreseeing I did not trust.

And in between these two levels of Seeing is another, fascinating level which I call the Essence of the Atonement (correction of the perception of separation from God), or simply Essence. Seeing Essence means Seeing the sort of theme of Oneness or Love or Spirit—whatever you want to call It—beyond, and often despite, appearances. Seeing Essence replaces ego’s projections of meaning, or judgments, on appearances. My trust in Seeing Essence vacillated as I did not yet understand my Authorship of appearances, which is what it was showing me. I sometimes feared it was a new, fancy form of fantasy that ego had conjured to mimic spiritual Sight.

When the Course advises you to “see Christ in your brother” or to “ask for another way to see this” Seeing Essence is what it means. This Seeing is natural in Spirit-consciousness, so not a practice. The practice in ego-consciousness is meant to invite this different Seeing, even if only briefly.

Essence is the actual level of the expression of the Atonement, appearances being the final, distorted expression of it. For example, the Onlyness of God is expressed in consciousness as the Unity, or Oneness, of Self with Self, which is Seen in Essence. Unity is then expressed in appearances as the person “being together with” or “joining with” one or more “other.”

Essence is the source of the material level Seeing— intuiting, foreseeing. Miracles, which express the Atonement by bringing some awareness of Truth to your mind, no matter how dimly or briefly, correcting your sense of separation from God, occur when your mind breaks through to the Essence of the Atonement.

My writing, for decades, came from insights that were Essence breaking into my awareness. This is why often what I wrote was slightly ahead of what I had yet realized. I was already Seeing but experienced it as Spirit teaching or clarifying.

After the shift in consciousness, coming out of ego was in the way of clear Seeing, but it did not prevent it. As egoic habits of thinking have wound down, Seeing has emerged to replace its judgments, revealing a whole new way to be with the material world. It is only an insubstantial frame around Essence.

 

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