“This is just an illusion”, “I am not a body”, or “only Love is real”… just some of the ‘words’ slung about at any, A Course in Miracles book study groups. All beautiful spiritual ideals that sounded good. Yet when ‘life’ started occurring with some (appearing real) ‘life train wrecks’, these words really couldn’t save me.

Death was starting to look like the best end that could be expected to an insane world. So how can these ‘words’ really assist in dealing with what felt like were real life dramas that ended in Death? This did not feel positive and that was looming as the best option. A massive ‘mind’ fuck.

The Tabula Rasa Mystery School was a thirty day living experience… could this really show me… give me an Experience of “I am not a body and only Love is real”? My gut said ‘do it’… and what else did I have to loose. The horizontal illusion was slowly strangling me. I was ready to try something ‘extreme’… I knew there was something else… and the bucket list had been done… there was nothing left ‘to do’… I have led a very full life. And then … what? Slip into isolation and quietly wait for it to be over.

This school, without books and the BEST teachers, took the process described in ACIM and allowed us to drop into Christ’s world for a moment. To taste, experience the Glory and Love that the Course speaks to, and as yet really only ‘lived’ as words in my mind. For the illusion appeared to be winning.

Insane Governments, cruel images, and death as the apparent end of all of it… the whole ‘rest in peace’ as our final goodbye…fuck… is this all there is… only to (in my particular beLIEf system) die and be reborn to another existence of insane governments, cruel images and another death, as an apparent end. Karma may assist me in having a few more ‘enlightened’ experiences, but the end always came with another death, another cycle. I wanted more. I wanted to go HOME… I want an end to ‘my insane beLIEf’ in life as I have created it.

When I initially heard about the school… I felt deep down, this might be the place to really take on a new ‘thought’ system… Could I possibly be happy all the time? Could I find Joy in every moment? Were these all pipe dreams written by a ‘crazy group’ of individuals. Many having since died… and are now ‘resting in Peace’… Cycling through with ‘better karma’ … My mind needed some unwinding!

So I signed on to Tabula Rasa with a bit of the thought, ‘It can’t hurt’.

In fact there were twenty souls that also ‘signed on’. We joined at the Course in Miracles Monastery in Utah, during May, 2017. Thirty days to Join in an idea… to Be Peaceful… to experience the Joy that I had only seen in figures like the Dalai Lama, or Yogananda. Living examples of Living a Life of Love and Joy.

I remembered seeing the Dalai Lama address a question once. A woman expressed many of the same thoughts I have had. How can anybody find the experience of Love when aggressors have decimated and attempted to destroy their very spirits? The Dali Lama in his Beautiful way… was silent for only a moment and answered her, “I give it no mind”…

So for thirty days, I Joined with others, to learn how to give this illusion called life, ‘no mind’.

What a ride. The first day’s meditation, ‘our’ (20 students) commitment palpable. Sitting in a room and I felt the depth of our desire for the same Experience. The room appeared to shudder in the silence and the depth of the meditation. I felt the room fill with, “I am here Lord”.

Now here is where the experience took over. Each one of us came with a different story… all included some version of suffering. The stories did not matter. We were all ready for the solution. To really challenge all our ideas of the way it appeared to be. One Problem.

We were all ready for the One Solution. Love. No Exceptions! The access, through accepting the atonement, our only function: To accept forgiveness.

WE JOINED in the idea that there was a veil to pierce through. It lived in our minds. It was the truth that we were not happy all the time, there were areas of our thinking that we did not love, that the best we could hope for is to keep ‘chaos at bay’… and not think about death.

The daily routine was filled with different functions. Preparing meals, painting, meditating, watching movies or singing… all allowed us to explore our internal truths. These individual processes were deep and really not a part of this share. However, the veil piercings were audible, palpable and very real during this month. I can speak only to this One Truth. A Course in Miracles is just a book that points to an experience. Studying it will only take us so far. We were Learning how to get honest and live an Experience that would challenge many beLIEfs. And with this inquiry, see and experience the lies we have been living with and telling ourselves. To See the source of our suffering, and our ability to rise above our ‘thinking’.

It was a wild ride in Trust!!! Trusting a process (A Course in Miracles) that until this moment, most of us had only read about and ‘studied’. The process was often primal and confusing. Trusting teachers that have committed their lives to Living Love. Sounds simple until you meet your own personal demons. BeLIEfs that have run the birth to death show. Occasionally appearing very real!

I liken the experience to what must have occurred during the transition in ideas from ‘flat world’ to ‘round world’.   Only this experience in Tabula Rasa dismantled the world as we individually understood it.

All I can say is, I look forward to the moment when I have access to thinking differently about everything in my apparent world. Then all those seemingly cruel images in my mind will disappear into a puff of nothing… from where they were conceived. And I can just get on with Loving and Laughing. My birth right, Your birth right… Our Innocence and the end of all suffering.

Tabula Rasa… the blank slate reveals Peace and Joy beyond my wildest imagination. I Choose this… Thank You God… I Love. Amen!