10 Jan 2013 Comments Off on Confusion is a Great Opportunity

Confusion is a Great Opportunity

If you are practicing the Workbook from A Course in Miracles and you are feeling confused, take that as a good sign. Spiritual paths are meant to disorient you. If you remain unmoved and unshaken, you are not really allowing the teaching to affect you–which indicates you are too mentally organized and too emotionally defended.

After all, if you actually understood everything the Course says, you wouldn’t be studying the Course. Intellectual comprehension can only take us so far. The real work begins when the ground shifts under our feet, when our way of seeing and hearing, listening and communicating, being and existing, changes.

Confusion helps us open our minds. Learning to tolerate confusion, and, eventually, to even welcome and relax into confusion, is, paradoxically, the quickest way to clear the fog.

Confusion can be experienced in many ways:

1. You may feel out of control or disoriented. Maybe the world feels a bit surreal–like you’re in it but not of it. This disorientation is natural as you bridge the gap from the ego thought system to the Holy Spirit’s One Loving Thought. Think of it as stretching 🙂

2. You may feel conflicted and call it confusion, even though it’s more of a back and forth between, “I want my personal life to be happy” and “I want to awaken to the truth that I am really formless Loving Light.” It’s understandable to struggle between wanting a happy dream and wanting (or not wanting) to take responsibility for being the dreamer of the dream. Here lies the ongoing opportunity to choose again: ego as teacher … or Holy Spirit?

3. You may feel foggy and unable to think clearly. Confusion can be experienced as a thick mist obscuring what is just ahead and making us grope slowly towards … we don’t know what. This holds the promise of moving through the fog into the Light–if we can tolerate the unknown and make small leaps of faith.

4. You may feel overwhelmed. You could be overwhelmed by choices, by the demands of your schedule, or by your emotional reactions. “Overwhelm” takes many forms. As a Course student, the Shakepearean prose, and the amount of material to read is often felt to be “too much.” You can join with your brothers–there are more ACIM groups and resources than ever before. Just ask the Holy Spirit for guidance–and it doesn’t hurt to “google” too! If you are taking an online class like my Workin’ the Workbook, take advantage of all the support that comes with the program.

5. You may feel paralyzed or trapped in endless procrastination. In Gestalt psychotherapy, there is a tremendously promising moment that occurs if the work is going well, and we call it “the impasse.”

The impasse is an opening in the mind in which our former defense mechanisms are dismantled and new ones haven’t formed yet. Visualize a clock that you’ve taken apart. All the pieces are laid out on a table.

Those pieces are components of your personality–the way your experience, your conditioning, and your temperament have come together to form your character. There is great opportunity in this temporary dismantling. Trust yourself to reorganize in a healthier way, free of old defenses. ACIM Lesson 153 teaches us, “In my defenselessness my safety lies.” One way of applying this lesson is to our relationship with ourselves.

A Course in Miracles, in Lesson 69, says it this way, “From where you stand, you can see no reason to believe there is a brilliant light hidden by the clouds. The clouds seem to be the only reality. They seem to be all there is to see. Therefore, you do not attempt to go through them and past them, which is the only way in which you would really be convinced of their lack of substance.”

Only by walking into the thick mist, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, will we emerge with clarity. First, we must be willing to be confused.