Symbolism and hard or soft energy

Again with Buffy The Vampire Slayer... I have now finished re-watching all seven seasons (144 episodes of 40 minutes each!), and it's just excellent.

In the very last episode, there are two incidents which especially resonate with me. One is about a vampire who used to be the epitome of evil and sadism, who has slowly turned himself around and is redeeming himself. At the end he has gotten a magic amulet, which lets him, deep underground, blast through to the sunlight high above and gather it in himself and redistribute it to blast away hundreds of attaching vampires who are threatening mankind. And of course it kills himself in the end, in burning agony. That burning force is a powerful symbol of the effect The Light has on persons or situations which are deeply enmeshed in The Ego. It's good, but painful. It burns stuff away.

And on a higher level, a similar thing happens. A powerful good witch, who has had trouble controlling her power in the past and staying on the side of Good, uses her power and a magic talisman to gather and pass on a great power for good to many people around the world who need it. And she is cleansed and uplifted in the process, saying after the energy rush something like: "Wow, that was cool!!"

Both feel very familiar to me, regarding when I connect to Source and sometimes pass it on. At the lower levels and mostly in the past, it's a good, but painful and burning force. At the higher levels and mostly now, it's an uplifting and cleansing power which exhilarates.

I think early on in the Journey, the energy of the Guilt and the Ego is hard as rock and it does not break up peacefully. But as you progress, it warms up and starts melting away instead of breaking up, and the process becomes much more pleasant. The light coming through  the dark… I think it’s “Burning" when the energy is still pretty tight. When it’s loose, it more of an orgiastic experience, like good sex on a higher level.

When I was a kid, I found some substance, pitch, which looked like black glass, very hard. But when I held it in my hands for a while, it would warm up and become malleable. And if I'd warmed it up more, it would have become liquid, and ultimately gaseous.

Loss for words

"As you forgive, you may find yourself to be more at a loss for words than you used to be. Don't worry about that. This isn't about looking smart; it's about being healed by the Holy Spirit. This process is already accelerating within you. As the Course says, you are no longer wholly insane."
- The Disappearance Of The Universe by Gary Renard, page 196

It's not what you choose, it's that you choose

First of all, I recommend the lectures by Ken Wapnick. They really cast light on the Course. I buy them as MP3 CDs, and make them into audiobooks for my iPod and iTunes with Audiobook Builder (Mac only, but there must be a Windows equivalent) (if not, it also works to just drag the files into iTunes. Makes many more "song" files though).

You can get the lectures here. If you want to use iTunes/iPod, get the MP3 versions, you save much conversion work.

I am currently listening to the lecture set Rules For Decision. A wonderful point Ken brings out is that getting yourself to a point where you are aware that you are constantly making a choice between the Ego and the Higher Self is much more important than which one you choose!

If you think you have to choose the HS every time (never get upset etc), you will have a lot of frustration and guilt, because you can't. And it doesn't matter. Just the fact that you are aware that you are choosing, no matter which side, will do it. Because it will eventually become very evident to you which side works best, and the rest will happen automatically.

Ken stressed this as hugely important.

Being spiritual

I got a comment to one of the ACIM videos I have posted on YouTube:

"The whole world is being taken into Satan's greatest last day deception--spiritualism. The Bible reveals how God reveals information to prophets, and He certainly doesn't do it by dictating to some atheist what He wants the human race to know..."

I find it interesting that this person seems to claim that God or Jesus would only ever speak to somebody who is already a believer/Christian. I think this goes very much contrary to what we know about Jesus. He talked to everybody, whores, thieves, tax men, everybody.

Also I find the claim interesting that spirituality is contrary to God's plan. To me that's like saying that eating is contrary to getting fed. It was pretty late in my life that I was shocked to realize that many Christians are not spiritual at all. They don't believe in the spirit! Many of them believe that Heaven will appear on Earth and the physical bodies will resurrect. I don't know what they think will re-animate the bodies if not a spiritual force. A Frankenstein machine?
(Even more incredibly, many believe that Jesus will appear as a warrior and slay the sinners and the unbelievers before Heaven appears for the worthy. This just goes so opposite to everything Jesus said that it leaves one speechless.)

Obviously this is no condemnation of Christians in general. Like Pursah says, in any religion there are highly spiritual people, and people who are rocks.

Ends and goals

"You must have noticed an outstanding characteristic of every end that the ego has accepted as its own. When you have achieved it, it has not satisfied you. This is why the ego is forced to shift ceaselessly from one goal to another..."
ACIM chapter 8

Magic

"She said that if using magic can give people what they want, then not using magic can give people what they need."
- Granny Weatherwax in Terry Pratchett's Equal Rites

Communication

"Certainly there are many "psychic" powers that are clearly in line with this course. Communication is not limited to the small range of channels the world recognizes. If it were, there would be little point in trying to teach salvation. It would be impossible to do so."
-- ACIM, Manual For Teachers

A bit lower:
"The seemingly new abilities that may be gathered on the way can be very helpful. Given to the Holy Spirit, and used under His direction, they are valuable teaching aids. To this, the question of how they arise is irrelevant. The only important consideration is how they are used. Taking them as ends in themselves, no matter how this is done, will delay progress."

Note it says "will delay progress". It does not say it's a sin. So far as I can see, the only real system of ethics we should have is: will this delay the Awakening process or speed it up. It does not matter what something you do does to the world, because the world does not exist.

The pain under addiction

Carol Howe's book Healing the Hurt Behind Addictions and Compulsive Behaviors taught me a lot about addiction and pain.

• Anything can be an addiction: cocaine, tea, work, TV, sex, exercise...
  
• The reason for an addiction is running away from an unseen pain.
• You can't cure an addiction if you don't heal the pain which caused it.

Ultimately, Life, The Universe, And Everything* is an addiction, caused by the pain of the (illusory) separation from Source/God. But of course it's possible to use a less absolute viewpoint on it. Somebody is always surfing the web until four in the morning even when he has to be up at seven? Addiction? Somebody is always getting into fights or in trouble with the law? Addiction?

One of the ways you can see an addiction is something which can keep your attention. Or something which makes you feel better for a little while.

How do you heal the pain? Wow, big question. There are many, many methods. Hypnosis, EFT, emotrance, therapy, meditation, etc etc. Of course if you want to get at the bedrock pain underlying all the smaller specific problems, I recommend "quantum forgiveness", as outlined by A Course In Miracles and The Disappearance Of The Universe.

* This of course was the question that Douglas Adams was seeking the answer to in the book of that name.

Marian added something in Comments I had actually intended to include in this post:

"An interesting thing about pain is how often it can be healed by the "not-doing" of refusing the tendency towards aversion (which is another way of saying forgiveness but might be an easier way to understand that forgiveness is not a doing of anything).
In other words if you are willing to shine the light of awareness on the pain, it is seen as dissolving. So you volunteer to suffer for a brief interval while watching the pain dissolve. And then you can see that what actually created the psychological hurt wasn't the pain itself but the aversion reaction.
The mind that wants you to run from the pain, IS the pain.
Shining the light of awareness on the pain, by the way, doesn't mean trying to figure out why the pain happened, or getting involved in finding the "cause" of the pain through mental analysis. Those tendencies are also aversion reactions...
What I'm talking about is just being with it, just sitting in it and feeling the essence of it and watching what happens without thought or judgment about the process."

Indeed. Like the Course says, what allows the pain or the Ego to persist is that we don't look at it. I find that as I have advanced, I have gotten able to see Pain or Fear or Guilt directly as abstract "blobs", and just relax with them, look at them, or even reach out and "touch" them in my mind, and they will gradually melt away. Sometimes it takes some determination and concentration, since the Ego would rather do anything else.

What you are doing in therapy is usually look at your ideas or past events, and when this works, it is because you have also indirectly been looking at the underlying abstract pain. When you don't do that, you can chew over the past or your ideas forever without getting any better.

A colorful dream

I had another lucid dream. Like the first one, it was totally real and detailed to me, and I was aware, much of the time, that I was dreaming.

But it lasted much longer. And it was so pleasant and big and beautiful. Everything in it (like architecture) was beautiful, and richly colorful, and interesting, and the people were friendly, I met old friends and made new ones.

It was just like a taste of how much better The Dream can become without the Fear and Guilt. (While surely being not a patch on Reality and Heaven.)

Just one detail, the colors, were amazing enough. I don't often dream enough colors to notice it, but this was just like... a genius painter's version of the world.

Also for a while there I could decide myself where to go in the cityscape (near the sea). I knew I was exploring a dreamed reality, and I was aware that it was shown to me for a reason.

Creating "evil"

A few years before finding ACIM, I had a "vision". (I saw it more as a perception, because it was not visited upon me, I looked for it.) Of how the concept of "evil" or "wrong" was created.

In the very early days of Time, before there really was a World, the Holy Spirit, or at least a very inspired (in spirit) indidual, was more or less the only one to see that Something Was Wrong. Because practically nobody could see it, and thus didn't do anything or communicated, the "lie" of Evil was created.

I saw it as just little black dots outside ourselves. The dot just symbolizes something that is outside. And as soon as it it outside, you can see it. And then you can blame it, and call it Evil. And since then has been a lengthy process of communication, which has solidified a universe and concepts like good and evil, heaven and hell.

And now we have arrived at the point where Evil is very clear to everybody, there is awareness that Something Is Wrong, just witness the Holocaust and 9/11.

So the next step is waking up to the fact that the Problem is actually not Outside ourselves, that is just a little projection we put out there.

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This was inspired by part of this observant post on the "Choose Again" blog.

Fixing problems

I think most of us at some time will try to use the Course to fix our problems. And that's not understanding correctly what it is. Using the Course and Quantum Forgiveness is like a savings account: it becomes very important in the long term (decades) but in the short term it does not fix anything at all, in the short term you need a hands-on approach.