Today we're going to talk about being normal. I think if there is one theme that has run
through the Foundation's teachings for thirty years, thirty some-odd years, it's that the
advocating of its students to be normal. And this comes out of a fundamental confusion
that students of A Course in Miracles have and that's where the level confusion that,
of confusing what I referred to in the past as level one and level two. Level one refers
to the fundamental metaphysics of the Course that teaches us that there is only truth,
everything else is an illusion. There is only God. There's only reality. There's only perfect
Oneness and perfect Love, and everything outside of that is unreal. And this, again, is what
we usually think of as level one which is the metaphysical foundation for the Course.
Level two is the more practical one and that deals with the contrasts not between truth
and illusion, or reality and the dream, but through right and wrong-mindedness both of
which are illusory. So level one deals with the entire world of illusion, contrasting
that with Heaven. Level two deals only with the illusion and contrasts it with the wrong-minded
thought system of separation, of the ego, and the right-minded thought system of the
Holy Spirit, namely our forgiveness. And what's important there is that in order for us to
learn our lessons, it is essential that we see our experiences here as bodies, psychologically
as well as physically, as classrooms. To be sure, everything in the world is an illusion.
But once we find ourselves here, the body and the world that were made as an attack
on God, that were made as limitations on love now become neutral. And they simply await
whether we learn through the ego's thought system of separation reinforcing our being
here in the dream or we learn through the teachings of Jesus or the Holy Spirit that
loosens our belief in the reality of the world and slowly and gently awakens us from the
dream. And the key here is slowly and gently. We are not asked to deny our experiences in
this world. In fact, in Chapter 2 we are told that to deny our physical experiences here
is a particularly inappropriate form of denial. Rather we are asked to live normal lives like
everyone else: eat, drink, have sex, enjoy things in the world, have nice possessions
if that is what is meaningful to us, have jobs, have insurance policies. Live like everyone
else, the difference being that we want to see everything here as a classroom, not because
it's real but it's a means to have us remember what is real. All too often throughout the
relatively brief history of A Course in Miracles, people have decided that since the world is
an illusion I should not be involved with anything in the world. Or on the other side,
I should be involved with everything in the world, because after all what difference does
it make since it's all unreal. And what we're not aware of is that this really is reflecting
the ego's hidden agenda to make the world real. If I flee from the world, it's because
I believe the world has power over me and is real. And if I embrace the world, it's
because I believe the world has something that I want, denying what the workbook lesson
says "The world I see holds nothing that I want." Instead what we are asked to do is
to be faithful to our classrooms, to be faithful to the various roles that we have from our
birth up to the time that we die, roles within our families, families of origin, families
we establish later, circles of friends, circles of colleagues at work. All the different roles
that we have and to be faithful to them not because they are real, not because they are
important in and of themselves, but because these are the classrooms we have chosen. And
we have chosen the classrooms of our lives for always one of two reasons, both of which
co-exist in our dissociated mind or a mind that dissociates. There is the wrong-minded
purpose which is to make the world real and establish our identity as separated, blaming
everybody else for it, or to see the world, once again, as this classroom in which we
learn how to forgive. Being normal is the way that we embrace the world as a classroom,
not as something that's the source of pleasure or pain, but as a means for our learning.
And so unless we are very specifically guided and are fairly certain that this guidance
is not coming from the ego, we should remain where we are. We should remain in our relationships
and remain in our professions and our various roles, still once again, not because they
are important in and of themselves but because these are the classrooms, these are the forms
we have chosen to learn from. I've always tried to emphasize that we are the ones who
established the classroom. We are the ones who established the curriculum which consists
of our everyday experiences and relationships. What is different is which teacher we will
choose to enter into that classroom and teach us through the curriculum we have chosen.
If it's the ego, then we will learn only through pain and suffering and attacking other people.
If Jesus is our teacher, we will learn that no one loses and everybody gains, but this
learning occurs, once again, through our looking like everybody else as Lesson 155 says but
we will smile more frequently and our foreheads will be serene. That's what teaches. It's
not the forms, but it's the content, the pain of the ego or the joy of the Holy Spirit.