Update (17 April 2020): I’ve added a couple of graphics that illustrate some of what we talked about in this conversation below with the captions “before: ego coverup” and “after: ego exposed” with some brief explanations below them, so I’m republishing this post. Since Jackie’s excellent first book uses metaphors from The Wizard of Oz, this seems quite appropriate to add here. Enjoy! :-)
Jackie Lora Jones, of the helpful “The 24th Hour – Positive News Magazine“, video blog YouTube Channel series of the same name also hosts a radio show “True Forgiveness Teachings” series on BlogTalkRadio on occasional Tuesdays. We continued our conversations about A Course In Miracles (ACIM) in this audio.
We talked about handling our challenges in this world from the perspective of ACIM’s teachings. Specifically, we shared how we can benefit from seeing the world in general – and the current pandemic in particular – as a feedback tool for seeing ego’s distortions and filters and not the cause of our peace or lack thereof, contrary to most of the world’s thinking. We’ve bought into ego’s mindless propaganda which seems to erase its insane SET-UP for disappointment from the flowchart of how we see the world so that when we’re UP-SET we’re forgetting we SET it UP to disappoint and keep us at the mercy of the world, rather than being merciful to it. Listening to the ego, we’ve reversed cause and effect and turned its dream into an imagined, unpredictable, fearful cause.
Cause: ego’s SET UP (secret dream) plants the seeds of disappointment, betrayal, self-sabotage.
Effect: ego’s UP SET (public dream) harvests blame and victimhood to perpetuate anger, attack, defense.
Ego doesn’t want to admit there is a cause in the mind (the inner shield of oblivion.) It tries at all costs to keep us from looking (with Holy Spirit) at our projection of unconscious, unfounded guilt. Once we look at this coverup with Holy Spirit – when we remember to laugh at ego’s tiny mad idea! – the hoax is seen as a genuinely forgivable, silly misunderstanding, not anything worthy of fighting against our natural state of peace.
Here is the “before: ego coverup” graphic; this is what we’re most familiar with and our typical starting place, since it’s the dream we believe we’re in most of the time:
In this insane “world view” (ego’s propaganda machine of fear in place – unquestioned), the curtain is drawn over the real source of our misery and ego thunders “Pay no attention to that dog.” Ego, acting as a stage magician, diverts our attention away from the drawn curtain to the “Wheel of Misfortune” (with a tip of the hat to Dr. Jeffrey Seibert for the original graphic concept and Tim Wise and Lyn Corona for similar charts. I have simplified it to just a circle omitting the detail by “zooming out” for the purpose of this illustration.
This video details a “zoomed-in” (literally and figuratively) view of the “Wheel of Misfortune” which details the myriad and ever-shifting categories of the issues the world keeps dishing out – seemingly independent of any involvement on our part, baiting us to attack all the crazy “alien enemies” that seem to beset the selves we think we are.
While we’re fixated on the specifics of the enthralling magic of ego’s spell-binding illusions, the world – like an incessantly spinning wheel with spokes that represent our relationship to our “own” bodies, “other” bodies, finances, politics, religion, technology, weather, etc. – basically relationships of every sort – keeps presenting challenges that seem to keep us off guard and ever battling the provocations “from” the world. Ego presents these “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” to us as cause and for the most part, we buy that propaganda, even though it never really solves anything to accept that idea. The UPSET continues unabated, even though the form keeps shifting because we don’t question ego’s misinterpretations, distortions, and filtered illusions to which we assign grievances of every shape and size. This feeds the machine and keeps the cycle going, but we don’t suspect we have cause and effect reversed since the world seems to come at us, not from us.
Ego hopes we’ll ignore the constant, patient whisper of our Holy Spirit, which asks us only to notice whether or not we’re experiencing peace and perhaps consider that we might not be upset for the reason we think. The Latin phrase “in Toto” means “all-encompassing” and that adjective appears literally on the first page of the Course – in the conclusion of the first page of the Introduction to the Text:
The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite. – T.In.1:8
So Dorothy’s dog, Toto, just happens to be a great symbolic reminder that the awareness we took with us into the dream that remembers our true Oneness and inseparability is what points out that ego’s curtain might just be covering up some important clues as to why our existence dominated by ego’s tyrannical rule is so dysfunctional and does not make us happy. With the drapes of oblivion pulled back, ego’s SET UP is exposed!
After Toto draws the curtain aside, we now have a more complete picture of how we project our unconscious, unfounded guilt onto the world’s “wheel of misfortune” – just as the Wizard of Oz ran an elaborate projection system in the theater of his little kingdom to divert scrutiny from the real cause of the scary and dramatic apparitions that frightened Dorothy and her companions.
We now see that it’s all been a hoax, a scam, a ruse, an elaborate SET UP that was the real cause of the UP SET. We had the right two words but – typical of the ego turning everything inside out and upside down, had the order reversed. Listening to its propaganda, we reversed cause and effect. What appears to be coming from the world is merely feedback (an effect) of the decision in our minds for the teacher of insanity. We thought we’d committed the ultimate crime of dismembering God, destroying Perfect Oneness and shattering the all-encompassing awareness that we always were, always will be and are now in Truth. Holy Spirit patiently waits for us to see its bigger picture, reframing separation as inclusion by extending our definition of Self to include everyone and everything. Once we do, what was just a separate self at the mercy of an insane world now becomes just a silly (completely forgivable) seemingly separate self whose identity is replaced with the Self we all share, capable of infinite patience and unlimited mercy.
We can see peace instead of ego’s misinforming propaganda, and we’re not upset for the reason we believed, prior to our inner “Toto” parting the veil to reveal the hidden working of the mind, allowing us to make a better, informed decision against the belief in separation, separate interests, and the fearful impostor played by the ego in the theater of our mind.
In the conversion above, we refer to an article by Ken Wapnick: Strengthening the Mind’s Immune System which both timely and timeless.
Here is an excerpt from the Introduction of “The Guiltless World” in chapter 13 of ACIM that we read and talked about:
“The acceptance of guilt into the mind of God’s Son was the beginning of the separation, as the acceptance of the Atonement is its end. The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws that seem to govern it are the laws of death. Children are born into it through pain and in pain. Their growth is attended by suffering, and they learn of sorrow and separation and death. Their minds seem to be trapped in their brain, and its powers to decline if their bodies are hurt. They seem to love, yet they desert and are deserted. They appear to lose what they love, perhaps the most insane belief of all. And their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground, and are no more. Not one of them but has thought that God is cruel.
If this were the real world, God would be cruel. For no Father could subject His children to this as the price of salvation and be loving. Love does not kill to save. If it did, attack would be salvation, and this is the ego’s interpretation, not God’s. Only the world of guilt could demand this, for only the guilty could conceive of it. Adam’s “sin” could have touched no one, had he not believed it was the Father Who drove him out of paradise. For in that belief the knowledge of the Father was lost, since only those who do not understand Him could believe it.”
Here is an excerpt of the description of the conversation from the related post on Jackie’s BlogTalkRadio website:
Sickness is of the Mind: Forgiveness and the Miracle Heal the Mind
ACIM teaches that sickness is synonymous with the belief in separation and with lack of Love. Whether it’s a virus or anything else, forgiveness is the answer! Today Bruce and I will discuss how the miracle can help us through anything, no matter how big it seems to be. I’ll share my thought processes and what helps me throughout the day. Let’s wake up from the entire time-space dream!
As always, these readings provide a platform to discuss a variety of helpful ideas and practices from the non-dual metaphysics of A Course in Miracles. Jackie has conducted insightful video interviews with Gary Renard, Joe Wolfe, and numerous others. She and her sister, Cindy Lora-Renard, facilitate a class on ACIM in the Los Angeles area in addition to equally highly-regarded workshops on “The Course.” Jackie’s first book, All Peace, No Pieces is a valuable addition to any Course student’s library, regardless of their level of familiarity with the Course’s ideas.
This audio recording was made Tuesday, April 7, 2020.
Here are more ACIM-related conversations with Jackie Lora Jones and Bruce Rawles.
