Enlightenment Ends the Journey

       In her book, The Real Christ, Bernadette Roberts details how Christ, or the awareness of truth, was lost in a cult of Jesus that arose in the early Christian Church. One of the ways this occurred was through a rigid insistence that only certain approved language could be used by writers and teachers, which meant much authentic experience was lost. If someone wrote about their genuine experience in language that was not approved by the Church, they were labeled a heretic and executed. She lamented this when she had begun having experiences that were not described in the contemplative or mystical teachings of her Church (The Experience of No-Self), leaving her without validation and support. Eventually, the Church’s power diminished and within and outside the Church there were many contemplatives and mystics who did write about their experience in their own authentic language, but she still could find only one or two teachers who wrote about what she was experiencing. She felt this was because either few were having these experiences or those that were did not write about them for one reason or another. Perhaps they could not find the words. Or perhaps, like she was to start, they were baffled by experiences they had not been led to expect from their studies.

After the shift in consciousness here that I call The Break when ego fell away and truth took up the center of this consciousness, this mind continued to try to understand and explain its experiences through the concepts of A Course in Miracles. It was often a struggle. For example, I could no longer find anything in this mind to which the idea of a “Son of God” could apply. But it was not until all the bloat and loftiness that ego brought to spiritual experiences fell away that the theological and ontological structures of the Course fell away, too. Well, duh. Of course. It was ego that insisted I try to fit my experiences into the Course’s structures because while pointing past ego, the Course doesn’t attempt to go past it.

 

“This course remains within the ego framework, where it is needed. It is not concerned with what is beyond all error because it is planned only to set the direction towards it.” (C-in.3)

 

The Course was solely ego’s journey. And as in the Buddhist “gateless gate”, the journey’s end (the gate) is the realization that that which went on a journey (ego) and the journey itself were illusions. So, of course the structures used for ego’s spiritual journey would no longer have meaning. It is clear now that the biggest obstacle to understanding what is really going on in consciousness, how it really works, was ego’s insistence on finding a “true self” or “true identity”, something the Course reinforces but is found to have been wholly for ego when ego falls away.

It is at this point that someone will ask me why the Course says what it says if it isn’t the whole truth. The Course is not the truth for all time for all. It is, in fact, the individualized curriculum of Bill Thetford. The ontology, theology, and psychology of the Course was shaped for Dr. Thetford and Helen Schucman, traces their relationship, and predicts what will happen for Dr. Thetford. You can see this even in the quote above. He did not go “beyond all error” until, just as predicted elsewhere in the Course, just before he died.

I am not suggesting that you dump the ontology and theology of the Course if it works for you. It did for Liz here up until the shift in consciousness because ego was the dominating thought system in conscious awareness here. What the Course teaches made sense then and brought comfort. It mitigated the pain of ego. But don’t cling tightly or be rigid about the Course, let your inner teacher lead the way. And understand that teachings that come from beyond ego consciousness come from a different world, which is why they may seem to contradict what the Course teaches. They are not “wrong” because they reveal the Course to be part of ego consciousness. Nor is the Course “wrong” because it occurs in and reinforces ego consciousness. It was meant for ego consciousness.

And if ego is to fall away for you, you will discover whatever path you took was only temporary. Be prepared for everything to fall with ego, including a spiritual journey and the structures that supported it. They do not occur outside of ego.

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