II. Miracles As True Perception, P 4
4 You are afraid of God’s Will because you have used your own mind, which He created in the likeness of His Own, to miscreate. The mind can miscreate only when it believes it is not free. An “imprisoned” mind is not free because it is possessed, or held back, by itself. It is therefore limited, and the will is not free to assert itself. To be one is to be of one mind or will. When the Will of the Sonship and the Father are one, their perfect accord is Heaven.
Journal
A Metaphorical Fable
As I read this paragraph I imagine myself as an unlimited being wondering what it would be like if I were not unlimited. Visually, I imagine Self as existing in every direction with no ending. (Yes, I know, there is no direction outside the illusion, but bear with me here. I am working from within the limitations imposed by the illusion as I do this.) So here I am, existing everywhere at the same time and in my desire to imagine something different, I draw a box around a small part of Self and pretend there is nothing outside the box.
Ok, now I have set my parameters and I can allow the experience to unfold. And, oh boy, does it unfold! There are quickly billions of little boxes within the box and within each of the tiny boxes experiences unfold and unfold and unfold. Organic is a word that comes to me. Changing and shifting and growing into something I had perhaps not anticipated. As it gets out of hand I begin to feel something entirely new to me. I begin to feel claustrophobic. How could I be so small? This can’t be right. What have I done? This new feeling is guilt and it is followed closely with fear.
I decide the best thing to do is to hide out in the strange and awful world I have made until I figure out what to do. There are so many new experiences and if I focus on them I can temporarily forget how small and confined I feel in this little box. I can also forget the guilt and fear. But now that guilt and fear are in this mind of mine, I see it everywhere within my little prison.
Guilt and fear and all its effects are the stuff of “creation,” the material I use to build this world, so to speak. As I think of what I have “created” I feel more fear because deeply buried in my mind is the certainty that this is not creation at all, and the fear is that to create outside God is defiance. Yikes!
I use it to make a world filled with guilty people doing guilty things and isn’t that handy. “Look, God, it was him. His behavior is so much worse than mine. Punish him.” My world is so far out of reality now that I have forgotten who I am and who God is and even that I am not really imprisoned at all, just thinking about all this.
If it were real, all would be lost, but it cannot be real. Remember, all that happened is that I wondered what it would be like. My wondering took the form of drawing a box around an unlimited Self and within that box allowing a world of impossibilities to grow. But it is still only wondering, imagination, pretend–like. I am not guilty of anything and there is nothing to be afraid of. In fact, there is no guilt and no fear except in my little box.
There is an escape route, of course, a way out and a Guide to help me find it. I cannot be held captive to my imagination. My captivity is part of my play and is self-imposed. The feeling of being trapped, of feeling cramped within my story is the awakening of the memory of who I am. The path out is one small step at a time which seems to take forever, but what is time to an eternal being? And remember, we are utterly free, and it is only a thought within this holy mind that we are, which imagines imprisonment.
I used to envision the path out as being lovely white stones, one in front of the other, going on and on, out of sight. I just trusted that they would lead me Home. I saw myself studying and practicing and with each effort moving forward to the next stone. Now I see it a little differently. I see that the path is made up of two stones side by side. One for each foot? No, silly, one for me and one for you. We go home hand in hand.
Our imagination made a world of separate beings and to undo this world we must rejoin. In the world of illusion that looks like me and you recognizing that we are in agreement on a single thing. I was mad at you and you were feeling offended. Still separate. I am getting a glimmer of the path out and that I want out.
I decide that more than I want you to be wrong, I want to be free of this confining existence. I accept the Atonement in this situation and Love heals my mind. I take your hand and we move forward a step. We don’t care about the disagreement anymore. We don’t care who is right or who is wrong. We don’t even need someone else to be guilty and so the entire situation shifts. Instead of standing in fear and guilt, our willingness, our true desire, drew us together and forward.
It is so simple that the mind mired in complexity tends to overlook it. But practice has brought it to the forefront of my mind and now it occurs to me more and more often. Each time I make that simple and obvious choice, I get closer to Heaven. As we make this journey we are preparing our minds for the ultimate undoing, the moment we take God’s Hand (metaphorically speaking) and the memory bubble bursts.
The world we made and all the dramas and the pain and suffering we take so seriously dissolve like a dream on awakening. How we will laugh to realize we did this to our selves, and that we did nothing at all. We were not taking a journey to Heaven, we were remembering that where God and His Son join, Heaven is. We could never have been separate from God because that is not His Will or Ours. We were only dreaming of separation and the dream is over.