I was excited about the five visits I had received from (ascended masters) Pursah and Arten, but I also felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me. I’d gotten used to learning spiritual and self-improvement programs that were designed to help me better the experience of my everyday life. Now I was attempting to apply a thought system designed not to improve my life, but to wake me up from what I thought was my life. This was a whole new approach. Ironically, the training I was now embarked upon would also raise my quality of life, with an emphasis on living for peace instead of strengthening myself to win conflicts.

In taking a closer look at my everyday life, I was shocked to see how automatic my judgments often were. I made gains in observing this knee-jerk tendency, detaching myself from it and taking the charge out of my grievances. That wasn’t all the way to forgiveness, but it helped me become more aware of my ego’s thought patterns. I realized that even in my discussions with Arten and Pursah, my smart-ass defense against shyness would dominate my personality and make me say things I probably wouldn’t say if my ego wasn’t running the show. I wondered if Arten and Pursah were just trying to make me feel comfortable by speaking to me in my own language; I realized that if I changed my style a little, they probably would, too.

As I practiced the Workbook lessons of A Course in Miracles, I was being steadily trained to choose to think with the Holy Spirit in my right mind instead of the ego in my wrong mind. This resulted in some wild and joyous light episodes during the day as well as bloody and horrific nightmares while in bed at night. I would have never believed such ugly images could be in my unconscious. I was sure that such nightmare images didn’t show up for everyone who did the Course, but here they were, reflecting the awful and insane self-image that was buried in the depths of my ego — and now being shown to me in order to be forgiven and released to the Holy Spirit in peace.

It was disconcerting to remember that my thinking wasn’t really being done on this level. The mind was signaling to my brain what to see, hear, think, do and experience. My brain was simply the programmed hardware that ran and regulated my body, relaying to me a movie that could be called “Life of Gary.”

The mind was like a programmer that told me, through my brain and body, what to experience and how to respond. I had been controlled like a robot, told what to do, and programmed to think it was really me making these decisions on this level. Just as a human being could build a computer, program it, and tell it what to do — or could direct a virtual reality figure to do things within an environment that didn’t truly exist — the programmer mind was directing me to move within and experience a world that didn’t truly exist in order to convince me I was a body. That body was sometimes getting what it wanted, but usually missing out on something, whether physical or psychological. This sense of lack was symbolic of being separate from God. The specific reasons for my problems were shown to me as external to myself, operating in a universe that was never really there, in order to serve as a scapegoat for my hidden unconscious guilt over that very same separation.

I realized that even though this unconscious mind that was calling the shots seemed to be outside of me, it really wasn’t. The mind issuing the directives of the ego thought system was within me, not without, which also meant that the universe was in my mind, not without. I had to turn the tables on it; Heaven was also here and was, in fact, all that really existed. There was no place else — but I had made an illusion that seemed to replace Heaven and then tucked that illusion in between myself and God in an effort to escape an imaginary punishment that I now secretly and erroneously believed I deserved. Like everybody else, I would find a way to punish myself for this imagined guilt. Yet all the while, God was merely waiting to welcome me home — as soon as I was healed by the Holy Spirit and ready to return to reality. We would then celebrate for all of eternity. Until now, I hadn’t had a clue about all this.