It is Just Common Sense to be Decent

            Liz here was only twenty when she became a student of A Course in Miracles so she felt that she could not have already learned ideas presented in the Course. If she came across something she already knew she felt it must mean something “higher” or “deeper” than what she had already learned. But she was mistaken. She had not yet learned that we don’t all learn things in the same order. A person at twenty could already have learned something that someone else doesn’t learn until they are fifty.

The most significant example of this is the idea that what you give you receive. Liz had already realized the reason she was a nurturer was that she felt love when she was loving, not when others loved her. Really, what she felt when she engaged in actions considered nurturing was satisfaction, but this is one of those “good” feelings that we call “love”. However, when she read the idea that one will experience whatever idea or attitude they project or extend, she felt it couldn’t be as simple as what she’d already learned. There had to be something more profound intended. But, no, it really was that simple.

Part of Liz’s misunderstanding was the great presence she felt when she read the Course. She would never have said it came from the book, she understood it was here in consciousness, but she did feel it largely only when she was reading it. She did not recall until she was in her fifties that she had already seen truth and illusion as a young child. Until then, she thought the Course brought these ideas to her when in fact it reinforced, but did not bring, an awareness of truth. So, she projected great significance onto the Course. Since it came from truth, it couldn’t be teaching mere common sense! No, there must be something deep and spiritually significant intended. There was so much guilt loaded into this, but she couldn’t see it. There is no unraveling ego and guilt and spirituality, they’re all the same thing.

The deflation of the Course and lofty concepts and experiences has continued here over the last several months since once valued mystical experiences were recognized as ego bloat. Ideas like God, Christ, and Holy Spirit (and their various iterations, like “True Self”) have fallen away to be replaced by plain, ordinary, simple truth, pure consciousness. Concepts like holiness, divinity, and sacredness are seen to be just another way of saying specialness. And the idea of love as something from truth is the latest to be punctured.

It is the strangest thing that “love one another” is considered an admonition when it is simply common sense. It is desirable because it is self-serving in a way that benefits everyone. You feel better when you come from a place of openness, acceptance, and respect for others. And the better you feel, the more you are motivated to continue to be decent. This basic, easily observable fact becomes fraught when it is delivered as a spiritual directive—from ego, by the way, not from anything real.

Truth is not love, but it inspires the good feelings in the body that we call love. What else would feel but the body and it is simply an expression in consciousness, a recorder and reporter of what is occurring in consciousness. Come from fear and the body feels bad. Come from love and the body feels good—or at least better. In a long winded, lofty way, this is what the Course teaches.

And it doesn’t disguise this; it says openly that it will not take away your illusions but convert them into something that feels better. For example, a “holy relationship” is just another form of special relationship:

 

“ …I said before that the first change, before dreams disappear, is that your dreams of fear are changed to happy dreams. That is what the Holy Spirit does in the special relationship. He does not destroy it, nor snatch it away from you. But He does use it differently, as a help to make His purpose real to you. The special relationship will remain, not as a source of pain and guilt, but as a source of joy and freedom.” (T-18.II.6)

 

What is the Holy Spirit or inner teacher? The effect on ego of truth rising toward conscious awareness. All that appears in consciousness is a depiction of a false idea (ego, the “I”) being “corrected” by truth rising to conscious awareness. This shows up as what we generally consider “growing up”: Taking responsibility for your thoughts, feelings, and actions, not out of guilt, but so that you can change those that do not serve you—do not lead to you feeling better. This does not mean you go around feeling good all the time, but that you recognize that when you feel bad you can accept a process that leads to you feeling better, like “growing up”, getting help, or grieving.

Any spirituality that does not deal with the personal experience in a common sense way, that does not deal with observable facts about the personal experience, that does not lead to greater knowledge and wisdom about the personal experience, that does not lead to growth within the personal experience, is ego, not from truth rising toward conscious awareness. It may not seem to make sense since ego is illusion, but the effect of truth rising toward conscious awareness is a healthier, more mature, and finally, actualized ego. And so much of this we already know as common sense.

 

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