26.02.06
0803 - The split mind and the two selves
Posted in the Branch at 7:36 pm by Kathleen 
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from Issue 008 — Sep 2002
Enlightenment is a realization, not an accomplishment. In our unenlightened state, we seem to be looking at or experiencing something that is not whole. This we experience within ourselves and outside us in the world. Our search for enlightenment stretches before us as a pathway that will lead us to wholeness or truth. However, our distorted view of truth keeps us chained to this questing pathway.
As an analogy, imagine you are holding two halves of an apple. The halves come from different apples. In your mind the two halves of different apples cannot be halves of the same apple. Yet, in reality, the two halves do form one entire apple. The problem lies in differentiating between apples. Because they are halves of different apples they cannot be the same apple. But apple is apple; and two half apples constitute a whole apple. Imagine you are the apple. Within yourself there is a split that seems to resulting two halves. One is your self, the other is not your self, or your ego self. This split extends out from you to the world you see. You are half or part of something and the world you see is half or part of something different.
The pathway to enlightenment is a process of relinquishing the thoughts you hold that keep these parts separate and different. Like the two halves of the apples, they are seen as not the same apple, not the same self, not the same world or experience. The Course emphasises this recognition of sameness. The ability to see what is the same in our myriad interpretations of the world of experience that we inhabit; and the transfer value of this recognition from one particularity to a totality. This is no less than a retraining of the mind to recognise the sameness of ideas. That there is intrinsically no difference in one idea or another; that within the unity of all Mind, all ideas are equal. Their value to us on a personal level lies in our application of them. For example, peace and war are two ideas. The experiential value of one or another of them lies in how it makes us feel. This is how we judge them. But within the totality of mind, any divisiveness, judgement or conditionality obscures the absoluteness of that totality.
This is why forgiveness and unconditional non-judgement is the way to peace. And peace is where there are no warring divisions or factions within the mind. This is what we seek, peace of mind.
When you literally bring your mind together, just like the two halves of apples, to form one whole, in which the idea of separate selves and separate worlds or experiences is seen as illusory, you haven’t actually accomplished anything. You simply see that you are whole and the same as everything else that pertains to that wholeness. You and apple are the same. Differentiation disappears as your mind assimilates and reintegrates what was whole all the time.
There is only one thing happening here. A repetitive division of wholeness that stretches interminably before the one who refuses to move out of the gap resulting from this division. The one who refuses to bridge the gap and admit the wholeness.
The Course reminds us that we are all spiritual adventurers. Each one of us stepped out of eternity, where everything is one, into the gap of division where time and opposites and separateness rule. We forgot our home in eternity and came to believe the gap was home; yet in the gap we feel destitute. However, just because we closed our eyes to eternity doesn’t mean that it went away. It is still here where we stand and everything is still whole as it always was, The Course tells us that our tiny mad idea and our dreams and illusions changed nothing. Therefore there is nothing we need do.
A Course in Miracles™, this exquisite expression of our own Infinite Self, is the light that shines the gap away and illuminates our wholeness. It does nothing but this, so, of necessity, it repeats and repeats itself. The Course facilitates the realization that is enlightenment. It is not just something we do to gain something we lack, but rather our admission and correction of our own distortion. The split mind and the two selves disappear into one. Like the two halves of apple, the “you” and “I” of our experience are then known to be one.
Kathleen