The 'Isness' of Experience

The ‘isness’ of experience in the now suggests that we accept our bodies and personalities as they are now also, but undo and escape from the burden of guilt the ego has placed on them. “Rather than harbor self blame (or blame) for a life of scarcity, for instance,” Ken Wapnick of The Course says, “we could surmount our painful circumstances by learning that feelings of self worth are not contingent on meeting the world’s criteria of success, but on recognizing that the mind is the source of all scarcity and abundance – and what we experience is our choice.”

 

Experiences of limitation: spiritual, mental, emotional or physical are almost always thought of as negative, that there is something wrong with us because….. But experiences of limitation are also great teachers. Consider Helen Keller. She shows us that inner peace is not dependent on external circumstances. There is nothing ‘wrong’ with having ego thoughts and ‘negative’ experiences as long as we don’t make them our primary focus.

 

We can escape from allowing ‘limitations’ and  ‘negative’ experiences to be our primary focus and to make us feel guilty by seeing them as opportunities to shift our identity, to quit identifying with ourselves and start identifying with ourSelves.  Appreciating that our experiences are a learning laboratory, shows us that the real problem is the mind’s decision to identify with the grandiosity of the ego’s littleness rather than the grandeur of spirit’s magnitude.