Purpose

Purpose – whether to awaken our spiritual reality, or sleep in the ego’s world illusion, is the sole determiner of meaning, uniting our disparate perceptions and reactions, allowing them to contribute to or disturb our inner peace. “Pain,” the Course says, “demonstrates the body must be real. It is a loud, obscuring voice whose shrieks would silence [the still small voice within us].

“Pain compels attention, drawing it away from [our reality] and focusing upon itself. Its purpose is the same as pleasure, for they both are means to make the body real. What shares a common purpose is the same. This is the law of purpose, which unites all those who share in it within itself.”

And so, the Course asks us to share true perception, the vision that sees beyond the illusions of differences, to the truth of the inner sameness of our minds. Using it, we can come to understand that since it’s all illusions, there can be no hierarchy of illusions - one being ‘better’ or ‘more important’ than the other, that everything we perceive with the ego is equally meaningless.

What is meaningful is how we interpret what we experience, who our teacher and guide is, whether our decision maker has chosen the ego or spirit. If we are able to be aware of the decision maker in our minds, then, when we experience the madness of believing in the ego, we are able to shift our purpose and teacher from remaining mired in the ego’s dreamworld of guilt - form over content, to awakening from this nightmare into the reality of our shared identity of oneness as spiritual beings, “God’s innocent Son” [masculine language courtesy of the Course].