Dreams and the practice of A Course in Miracles

A few nights ago I had a dream that upset me. I was in Buenos Aires, in one of the nicest avenues, except that in the dream it was grotesquely fancy. The street was lined with designer store fronts that were gilded with gold leaf and the side walk was tiled with white Carrara marble. It was crowded with shoppers carrying Christmas bags. I had just parked my car and I walked carefully carrying two stacked trays of ham and cheese croissant sandwiches and a fruit platter on top. I was taking the food to a meeting at the goodwill offices which were right up the street.

A woman accidentally swung a shopping bag over my trays and they fell to the ground. The croissants and fruit scattered all over. Within seconds, a half a dozen orphan children dressed in rags were diving for the sandwiches and the grapes which still rolled every which way on the crowded sidewalk.

I went up to a little boy of about six who was collecting green grapes in between the people's feet. I helped him pick up a few that had landed under a mail box. I said, "Sweetie, can you wash them before you eat them?" He looked at me with his big sad brown eyes; his face smeared with dirt, and nodded, then kept reaching for more. As I looked up, the shoppers wearing nice clothes and carrying bags with expensive gifts, walked by as if the children did not exist. Some walked around them; others pushed them to the side avoiding eye-contact. Nobody wanted to notice the children. It was as if the integrity of their perfect lives could be preserved ONLY if they didn't look.

When I woke up my eyes were wet. I had a feeling of helplessness that stayed with me even though the dream was over. My instinct was to move away from the pain, just like the shoppers in the dream, but I stayed with it for a few minutes and as soon as I became fully awake the pain left me, instantly.

It is tempting to believe that the circumstances within a dream can have an effect on us. Dreams can be convincingly real and while we sleep, they seem to be the cause of our suffering. For a while, I really believed I was sad because I felt sorry for the orphan children. But once I woke up I realized that in reality, there is no posh street with stores gilded in gold leaf; there are no croissant sandwiches, no indifferent shoppers and no orphan children. Even the character with which I identified in the dream, while she looked like me, in reality, does not exist. The real source of my pain is that I forgot I was dreaming and I got emotionally involved in a non-existent situation.

In the same way, what causes us to suffer in our lives is not what happens to us, but that we believe we are someone we are not. We believe we are separated selves living in the world apart from our Source. In Lesson 5 in the workbook we practice repeating that: "I am never upset for the reason I think." I think I'm upset because some circumstance made me upset, but the real reason I'm upset is that I believe I'm a character in a dream subject to the conditions of the dream.

The practice of A Course in Miracles is about remembering that we are the dreamer and not the character in the dream. Only the dreamer who caused the dream can choose to awaken. The goal of our practice is to get back to the mind of the dreamer because only he can choose to be whole again. But day in and day out instead of learning that we are the cause of the dream and not the victim of it, we give the world power over us by making it the cause of our pain and suffering. Every time we suffer, we demonstrate that the world must be real because it had the power to cause us pain. Only what is real can cause an effect.

The daily practice that can help us decrease our identification with the character in the dream is quite simple. Whenever something upsets us, we stop and look at it. We don't run away from the anxiety or the pain. If we do, we give the dream power and a reality it doesn't have. We first recognize that if we are upset, it must be because we are looking at the problem from the perspective of the character of the dream. The character of the dream believes the world is real and can have an effect on her. The character in the dream is identified with a vulnerable body she thinks she needs to protect. It's pretty scary being a character in a dream and believing the world can strike at any moment. So we look again, but this time instead of looking at the problem from the point of view of the character of the dream, we look at it with the part of our mind that knows our real identity. The Holy Spirit, which is the memory of God within our mind constantly reminds us that we "are at home in God, dreaming of exile but perfectly capable of awakening to reality." (T-10.I.2:1) And while the situation that upset us may not change, the anxiety and pain associated with it will fade because we will, at least temporarily, become aware that we are dreaming and that dreams can have no effect on our true identity.

It's very easy to become invested in the situations of our lives and to believe that by changing the circumstances we can have peace. This is nothing more than a trap. If I knew that waking up would instantly heal all suffering, why would I try to ease the pain by focusing on changing the circumstances? Had I been lucid in my dream of a couple of nights ago, I could have given every orphan child a loving adoptive parent. I could have clothed them and showered them with beautiful Christmas gifts. That would have made the dream much happier. I might have found a temporary feeling of peace and wellbeing like we have in our lives when we get what we want, but that peace is not the perfect peace of God which can only be experienced by knowing who we are in reality.

The practice of ACIM is not concerned with making the dream more pleasant. If the world is an illusion created by the ego to keep us mindless, why would we invest in changing it? As we obsess over global warming, war, poverty and we fear that we might catch the next flu virus, the ego is fulfilling its purpose of keeping us identified with the character in the dream. The Course doesn't tell us what we should or should not do. When we are called to help others, or if we want to champion a cause that we believe in, we should do it, but without joining in the suffering. We can use any activity we choose within the world for the purpose of overcoming the dream. All professions, causes and activities are equally suitable for that purpose.

What we don't want to do is focus on changing the circumstances because as long as we do, our investment will be on keeping the dream real rather than on waking from it. What we are here to demonstrate is that the dream can have no effect on the peace of God in our mind. Whenever I feel stress or anxiety, I look at my investment in the dream which shows up as attachment to outcome. Do I 'need' for a situation to be resolved in a certain way for me to experience peace? Whenever I notice a need, I can be sure I am looking at the situation from the perspective of the character in the dream whose happiness depends on the circumstances of the dream.

Once we make the shift from identifying with the character in the dream to looking at the world from the perspective of the mind, everything changes. If someone attacks me, I don't blame her because in the attack I recognize that like me, she is just trying to hold on to her false identity. I begin to realize that we are all the same. We all fear awakening from the dream. We all cling desperately to our false identities because they are all we know.

But the more we practice looking at our guilt and fear, which show up in the world in symbols such as orphan children, suffering victims of natural disasters, war, etc., and we recognize that what we are seeing is just a picture of the fear in our minds, we begin to awaken to our true identity. Progressively we experience more and more of the peace that is our natural inheritance.

 

From the section entitled "The Hero of the Dream." T-27.VIII.9: 1-8 In gentle laughter does the Holy Spirit perceive the cause, and looks not to effects. How else could He correct your error, who have overlooked the cause entirely? He bids you bring each terrible effect to Him that you may look together on its foolish cause and laugh with Him a while. [You] judge effects, but [He] has judged their cause. And by His judgment are effects removed. Perhaps you come in tears. But hear Him say, "My brother, holy Son of God, behold your idle dream, in which this could occur." And you will leave the holy instant with your laughter and your brother's joined with His.

 

 

Forgiving our parents: revisiting our self-concept

I had a very helpful dream about a month ago. I was having lunch with a friend when I noticed my father and his wife entering the restaurant. He saw me from the distance and rushed to greet me. He was visibly happy to see me. From a bag he pulled out a photo album and handed it to me. “This is for you,” he said and walked away.

The album was filled with photos that captured a moment from every encounter we’ve had since I was born until I moved out of Argentina when I was seventeen. It wasn’t very thick since my mother and father separated when I was 10 months old and I didn’t see him at all between the ages of two and sixteen.

As I leafed through the photos, what stood out was the love that I saw in my father’s eyes as he looked at me. As a child, though I tried not to think about it, the feeling I had was that if he loved me, he would make the effort to see me. Even though I had a happy childhood with an excellent mother, a part of me felt abandoned.

At the back of the album there was a scrapbook where my father had pasted articles that appeared in the paper about him including a very favorable eight page biography with photos highlighting his accomplishments. As I began to read, he appeared next to me. Looking into my eyes with a sweet, innocent smile he said: “Can you see me from this perspective?”

The thought that occurred to me as I woke up was that for most of my adult life, I didn’t know who my father was. All I was intimately familiar with were my thoughts about him. For a long time I looked at him and interpreted his actions through a thick layer of beliefs that I had developed about him as a child. Once we have a belief about someone, unless we are willing to re-examine it, it colors our view of them.

His actions only confirmed what I thought I knew about him. Our mind has a way of only noticing what validates our beliefs. Everything else, we literally don’t see. A Course in Miracles points this out early on in the preface:”What perception sees and hears appears to be real because it permits into awareness only what conforms to the wishes of the perceiver. (Preface X.)”

Though I had a fairly good relationship with my father, a part of me blamed him for having abandoned me and assumed that his having done so had a damaging and permanent effect on me.

Sometime in my middle twenties I began to notice what I thought was the effect of my father abandoning me. I saw that though I outwardly appeared confident and outgoing, I was dependent on people’s love and approval. I needed to be noticed and appreciated and it was difficult to open up to people. I unconsciously feared that once they knew who I really was, they would reject me, just as my father had rejected me as a child. I blamed my father for the fact that physical touch from people I didn't know well felt uncomfortable, almost painful.

It is not uncommon to blame our faults, our reactions, and behavior to the way adults in our lives treated us when we were children. Many other factors like order of birth, social situation, education, religion, also seem to have an effect on who we become. This is obviously true at the level of form – we appear to be; both physically and emotionally, the product of our genetics and our upbringing.

But as long as we blame our parents, or the environment we grew up in for our feelings, defects, shortcomings or our unhappiness, we are tying ourselves to a limited self-concept that roots us in the ego-thought system of separation. The gradual building of a self-concept is the ego’s purpose. The Course tells us that “The building of a concept of the self is what the learning of the world is for.” (T-31 V.1:5) From the moment we are born, we learn who we supposedly are. It’s that identification with the self that prevents us from ever knowing who we are in reality. As long as we continue to ‘learn’ who we are by looking at our past and blaming others, we will strengthen our identification with a false sense of self and continue to live in an illusion. As long as we think we know who we are, the ego is safe.

Forgiving our parents is a first step in the direction of letting go of deeply rooted self-concepts that color the way we see. In the dream, my father urged me to look at him from a different perspective. Forgiveness always involves looking at a person or at a situation from a different perspective. As adults we have the opportunity to re-visit every assumption and interpretation we made as children and look at it through more mature, forgiving eyes.

After a fairly insignificant event, anger which until then had been masked as mild annoyance, surfaced one day in 2002. Before then, I thought I had a good relationship with my father. All the beliefs that I had been unconsciously holding about him rose to the surface and poured out. The pain felt like an open wound that keeps bleeding and does not scar. I knew exactly why I hated him. A trial took place in my mind. My interpretation of every one of our encounters was used as evidence against him. The verdict was that he did not love me and he was responsible for the way I was. If anyone cared to listen, I was able to come up with all the evidence that would prove him guilty beyond doubt.

For a while I paid lip service to wanting to forgive, but the resistance was like a granite wall. A part of me did not want to let go of the pain. That was the first time I became aware of how the ego wants and needs to suffer.

Eventually, I noticed a tiny desire to choose against the pain and the process of forgiveness began. I prayed daily for a change of perspective. I asked the Holy Spirit, which is the memory of God in our minds, for a new interpretation. A six year journey began in which I looked at every assumption, interpretation and story I had made about my father and let it go. I began writing this blog one night last year after one of the many opportunities I had over the years to practice forgiving him. http://forgivingeyes.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html

Over time, it became clear that the reason I felt abandoned was not because my father left, but because I interpreted his leaving as irrefutable evidence that he did not love me. Through the forgiveness process, I saw that the reason my father chose not to see me was not that he didn’t care about me, but that he was dealing with his own set of difficult emotional problems that prevented him from being there for me when I was a child. I understood that he was doing the best he could. He himself had had a very difficult childhood.

As I forgave my father, I became free from the belief that I needed him to appreciate me and love me in order to be happy, self-confident, or at peace. It became clear that neither his words nor his actions could have an effect on me. It was always my choice to give him that power over me.

Sitting at dinner last week with my father, his wife and their three adult children, I experienced freedom for the first time. We had a delightful evening. My mind was quiet – there was no reaction to anything my father said or did. On the contrary, I felt this gentle loving sense take over me which felt almost impersonal, but thoroughly loving and compassionate. When I spoke, the words came out of this love so I spoke kindly and without effort. I was uncharacteristically interested in what they were saying. I was in the moment, celebrating every story, every joke. We sat around the table having the best time until after midnight. It was as if time stood still.

I was aware of the incredible freedom that comes from being in the presence of someone from whom you don't need anything. As I sat on a stool in the kitchen watching my father cook and later at the table seeing him laugh and talk, I saw only love in his eyes. There were no interpretations, no second-guessing. The fog had lifted and I saw him as he is.

My actions were natural and free. I didn’t need to impress him or do anything to earn his love. I felt loved, not because he loves me, but because love was in me.

“Salvation is nothing more than an escape from concepts” (T-31 V. 14:3)

The metaphysics of projection

I just had a bizarre dream. I was in a parking lot alone at dusk looking for my car, when I noticed two very mean-looking and destructive young men dressed in black leather who were riding over some trash cans with their motorcycles making a huge mess of broken glass, paper, and remnants of fast food. When they saw me, they rode straight toward me as if they were going to run over me and just as they were about to hit me, they swerved and missed me. They did this over and over again. I tried running in different directions and would get fairly far, but on their motorcycles, they always caught up to me.

Finally, they cornered me so that I couldn't go in any direction. They folded their arms and laughed meanly – like the evil characters in Disney movies. Then one at a time, looking into my eyes, they each said: “I am you.” As they spoke they disintegrated into a million particles which flew in my direction in a current and my body absorbed them through my head.

A feeling of absolute terror took over me -- ten times worse than the fear I had experienced when I was being chased in the parking lot. Though I had been fearful as I was chased, at least I felt innocent. I was an innocent victim and they were the evil perpetrators. Now I had no one to blame but myself for the situation. The guilt that I had unconsciously projected outward in the form of evil motorcycle riders, I now experienced within me. The feeling was so awful it woke me up abruptly. As I write this, about fifteen minutes later, I still feel my heart beating against my chest.

After a few minutes of sheer terror, and of my asking “What is this for?” over and over again, I understood why we, as separated beings who identify with the ego, must project our guilt and fear. The Course explains that guilt had its origin in the belief that we chose to separate from God. As One with Him, we had everything, but we chose to give up that perfect existence for a life separate from Him. Though we don't have any memory of having made this choice, the guilt that we experienced is still with us. We must project it outward because we can't live consciously aware of it. The psychological pain, as I experienced briefly as a result of my dream, would be too much to bear.

By unconsciously projecting our guilt, we are able to live the illusion of being innocent victims subject to external forces beyond our control. We thrive on blaming others for everything that goes wrong in our lives. When we are unhappy we believe that external circumstances like the economy, political situation, our spouse, our children, our job, or our financial situation, are the cause of it. Like the Course says, not once do we think guilt has anything to do with it.

Our experience of the world is so real that we can't conceive of it being our own creation. We have no memory of our choice to project so we perceive our projections as external to us. The Course refers to the world as "an outside picture of an inward condition." Our guilt shows up in the world in the form of whatever causes us distress: two mean guys in a parking lot, a driver cutting us off in the freeway, a friend treating us unjustly, a repairman ripping us off, an employer taking advantage of us, a corrupt politician, a religious fundamentalist, etc. etc. etc.

As long as we look at the world through the eyes of the ego, we go about our day unconsciously looking for situations in which we can re-affirm ourselves as separated beings. We justify our anger, our moods, our attacks by always finding some external person or reason to blame. As long as we focus our efforts on all that appears to be external, we are prisoners in the ego's thought system with no chance of release.

The way out of the ego thought system is to re-claim our projections. What that means is that when I'm in a difficult situation, instead of finding blame outside of me, I forgive. I first notice my emotions. Am I angry, upset, anxious? Do I feel the need to shift blame elsewhere? If I do, I must be looking at the situation with my ego.

All I'm asked to do is shift my perception from the ego to Love. I invite the Christ to look at the situation with me. He reminds me that all the anxiety and fear I'm feeling does not come from outside, it comes from my choice for the ego. In reality, I am safe and at One with Him.
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For a more detailed metaphysical discussion on this subject go to metaphysics of separation and forgiveness -- A lecture by Kenneth Wapnick, which is also available in tape or CD form from facim.org