Spirit guides; ego controls. Spirit is real. It's eternal, of course, and I believe it's our sole and essential essence. Unlike ego, which pushes to control us every moment, Spirit seeks to guide us. In the 1975 book, A Course in Miracles, Helen Schucman, the scribe who intently listened to the voice of Jesus for seven years, presents a program for spiritual transformation that has complemented my thinking for nearly three decades. Jesus shared with Helen that the greatest miracle we can achieve in our lives is to gain a full awareness of love's presence. According to the principles of the Course, Spirit is absolutely all that is real about us. And the realization that Spirit is unending is an awareness that constantly blesses me.
I find this principle both comforting and, at long last, quite believable. What our eyes feast on are illusions, often amazingly “real” illusions. People or trees; dogs or horses; cars or houses; mountains or lakes; our bodies as well as our neighbors' bodies. These are all illusions that we have projected into this classroom of life that the ego has conjured up around us.
What a startling and elusive idea this was for me when I first encountered it a few decades ago! How could the ego have that much power? But the ego, according to the Course, always speaks first; it's always loudest; and it's always wrong. And we all too willingly let it hold us hostage, drawing us away from the quieter, kinder path of Spirit. But if the only thing that's actually real is Spirit, how can the ego so easily commandeer our attention? That's its power. That's the power of the illusion it has created.
Spirit never leaves; it's within us always. But it's not pushy. It's not insistent. It's available when we are willing to remember its presence. And it is eternal. But we must do our part; we must be willing to turn in its direction and to open the door. Again and again.
Our bodies, which appear to be real—we can touch them as they carry us from place to place, after all—serve us in only one way. They transport us from one specifically chosen encounter to another in this elaborate classroom of illusions. That's their soul purpose. This is certainly not an unworthy purpose, because all our encounters are specific to the greater purpose we each have that mirrors what we agreed to experience before waking up in this classroom. However, it's imperative that we remember that nothing about these illusions is actually real—except to the ego. Nothing about them will last except in our fearful minds, which are also the ego's creation. And yet they serve a purpose, one that's necessary to the Whole of us.
Every experience you have in the classroom of the ego is contracted for—agreed to. Your “learning partners” are specifically selected and are as necessary to your journey as you are to theirs. Each encounter experienced—those that feel significant as well as those that seem merely fleeting—are individual threads in the tapestry you were born to weave. Remember: There are no accidental encounters. You are always where you are meant to be, meeting those you are supposed to meet.
Spirit is the primary fact of our existence. And here is the truly mind-bending truth about it: Spirit remains at “home.” In fact, it never actually leaves its home, which is heaven. And we are still there, at home, as well! Regardless of how the ego makes it seem—and it works very hard to convince us otherwise—we are still there. Accepting this as an indisputable truth gives me great peace now, although it also gave me many moments of disbelief when I first encountered it. How can I, how can we, be in two places at once? “At home” with Spirit and in this classroom of the ego. How indeed?
Of course, the simple answer is that we can't be in both places at once. And yet this classroom looks and feels so real. My body looks and feels so real. And yours does too. I, for one, appreciate the constant reassurance of others who share the same spiritual principles that guide my life—that we are Spirit. Period. Still “at home.” Period.
We “wear bodies” in this classroom simply so that we can gather the knowledge we seem to have forgotten. Yet, in reality, nothing we ever knew as Spirit is gone; it is only temporarily hidden from us by the ego, which glories in the chaotic conundrum in which we find ourselves, here and now. The ego has taken us hostage and we have unknowingly succumbed.
This particular principle had to be one of “the twenty things I know for sure” because of the comfort it offers me every time it comes to mind. As a matter of fact, that was the test for each of the twenty principles that comprise this book. How much peace do I feel each time I quietly consider each one of these principles? Peace was and is the inherent gift that lies within each principle given here. And peace is the gift I hunger for in my own classroom of the ego.
Believing that Spirit is real and eternal also allows me to continue communicating in my own quiet way with each of my loved ones who have “gone home,” and that feels extremely necessary to me. Because they and we are all Spirit, no channel is needed to connect us. We simply are in direct communication through our unending Oneness. These loved ones are the “hovering angels” who grace my life—and yours as well, if you choose to share this belief.
Like so much else about Spirit, Oneness was initially a hard concept for me to grasp. We look so separate. We feel so separate. And in the classroom of the ego, every occurrence supports the concept of separateness. My own seduction by the ego and the transference of its idea that we are separate individuals in constant competition with one another was quite complete. I was held hostage by the ego and its ugly misinformation for the first half of my life. And I didn't even know it!
And yet that isn't the truth about us. We are One. We are eternal. And Spirit is the whole of us, regardless of what the ego tries to project.
What a glorious truth this is.
Remember: The ego always speaks first. And it's the loudest. And it's always wrong. This makes it an extremely subtle foe. All we have to do is look around us or turn on the news to see the evidence of its work. We hear of young people who are gunned down in a small town. There are battlegrounds everywhere. But if we remember the truth about ourselves—that we are Spirit, not ego, and that we are One—we can eventually turn the tide and transform the ego's classroom from a nightmare into a “happy dream.”
This may seem beyond the capacity of humankind, but Spirit is all-powerful. And Spirit stands at the ready to support us when we open the door to it—now, this moment, and forever.