BoomerGirl Diary

“Reality is only an illusion, albeit, a persistent one.”

— Albert Einstein

I was playing the board game Clue with a couple of my daughter’s friends. We passed out the detective notebooks and placed the rope, the lead pipe and the other miniature weapons in the miniature mansion’s miniature rooms.

I said to Kylie, who because she was sitting closest to the purple token was playing Professor Plum, “Why don’t you go first?”

The two girls looked at me as if I’d just asked them to take a shower in the boy’s locker room.

“Mom, Miss Grout!” they loudly protested.

“What? What did I say?”

“Everybody knows Miss Scarlett always goes first.”

Likewise, they explained that in order to make an accusation you have to be in the room where you think the murder took place and if you want to take a secret passageway, you can only do it between the parlor and the kitchen or the library and the conservatory.

“Who says?” I asked.

“The rules. It says so right here.” One of them thrust the neatly-printed rule sheet in my face.

These "engraved-in-stone" rules remind me of how we play “life.” Somebody — the ego maybe? — decided that this is how the world works, and because we all agreed to “see it that way,” we made it a “reality.”

Turns out, we’ve all been had. Nearly all the concepts and judgments we take for granted are gross distortions of things as they really are. Everything we think is “real” is simply a reflection of the “Clue rules” we all agreed upon. The world we think we see is merely the projection of our own individual “Clue rules.” And guess who wrote most of the rules? Our ever-popular friend, the ego.

According to the Course in Miracles, it’s time to take those Clue rules, cut them up, and use them as confetti. Until we do, until we finally get it that we are “wholly loved, wholly loveable, and wholly loving,” we will continue to feel empty, question our purpose, and wonder why we’re here.

That’s why we need to ask for a whole new lens for looking at the world.

The Course in Miracles clearly states that we have no conception of the limits we have placed on our perception. It says, if we really knew the extent to which we have denied the world’s loveliness, we would be shocked. Our confusion is so profound that, at this point, most of us cannot even conceive of the world without sacrifice. But here’s the thing: the world contains no sacrifice except what we laid upon it.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to consider just how deluded we’ve become.

A few days after Eckhart Tolle’s 29th birthday, he was suffering an intense, suicidal anxiety attack. His life so far had basically sucked sewer slime. On this particular night, he kept saying to himself, over and over again, “I cannot live with myself any longer.” Suddenly, he says, “I could feel myself being sucked into a void.”

When he “woke up,” all he could experience was love, a state of deep, uninterrupted peace and bliss.

His intense pain forced his consciousness to withdraw from all the limits he had placed on it. The withdrawal was so complete that his deluded self, his unhappy and deeply fearful self, immediately collapsed like an inflatable toy without a plug.

He spent almost two years doing nothing but sitting on park benches in a state of intense joy.

“Okay,” you’re thinking. “I’m starting to feel uncomfortable now.” Or you’re flat-out bamboozled, wondering how in the hell did he support himself? How did he eat? That’s not playing by the “Clue Rules.”

Thoughts like those simply point out that you’re still playing by the ego’s delusions.

Or consider Byron Katie. This California real estate agent was in the middle of an ordinary life — two marriages, three kids, a successful career — when she went into a deep depression. She checked herself into a halfway house for women with eating disorders, not because she had an eating disorder but because it was the only facility her insurance company would cover. One night, while lying on the floor in the attic (“I didn’t feel worthy enough to sleep in a bed,” she says), she suddenly woke up without any of life’s normal preconceived notions of sacrifice.

“Everything was unrecognizable. All thoughts that had troubled me, my whole world was gone. Laughter welled up from the depths and just poured out. I was intoxicated with joy,” she says.

Like Tolle, she went home and sat by the window, staring out in complete bliss for days on end.

“It was like freedom had woken up inside me,” she says.

If you follow the Holy Spirit’s plan instead of the ego’s “Clue rules,” you’ll discover how sublime life really is.