Hello, I am Chong Weiqiang from The Road of Miracle Network. In this part, I will first outline the levels of spiritual experience and the connotation of the theological word “holy spirit”. This illustration will enable you to understand the general steps of awakening from the big dream of life. Then, I’ll go on to illustrate other modes of thinking in this thought system by using the common examples of life.
First of all, I will talk about three levels of spiritual experience:
1. Experience of you as the son of god living in the kingdom of heaven. The specific feeling is as follows: you will eternally confirm that you are a spirit living within God forever, because in the kingdom of heaven, you will have an eternal feeling that you are just a completely safe, pure, innocent, bright, infinite, constant, perfect, holy, intangible, joyful, free and abstract spirit. And you will be eternally certain that you are inseparable with other infinite number of spirits. This “awareness” of living within the kingdom of God is the first level of spiritual experience you can have. And only this level of experience really exists; that is to say, only the kingdom of God exists.
2. All heartfelt feelings that take the world as real, and consider yourself to be living in it in the form of a body. You can take the above part as reference to understand it. If you are also a believer in transmigration, you can add that you take the soul world after death as real and consider yourself to be living in it as a soul. These two heartfelt feelings are the second level of spiritual experiences you can have. And before you return to the kingdom of God, you can only go through these two illusory worlds of life and death, so these two worlds of life and death belong to one dream, not two.
3. The Spiritual experience for practicing the thought system based on true forgiveness and giving innocence. The main attributes of this kind of spiritual experiences is a kind of eternal peace, which is without opposition and consistent. This is the third level of spiritual experience you can achieve. And at this level, you can further see the illusory nature of all beings in one person from the outside, and then you can further extend the innocence from within one person outside of you into all sentient beings. At that time, you and all sentient beings will become a peaceful and abstract unitary state of mind. This state of mind can not only dissolve all heartfelt feelings that take all the illusory world as real, but also extremely resembles the kingdom of God, where you and other spirits are absolutely peaceful and unitary existence. Therefore, this peaceful and abstract unitary state of mind can be regarded as a miraculous state of mind as compared to the second level of spiritual experience. (The miraculous state of mind is hereinafter referred to as miracle mind).
What is the origin and content of the miracle mind, and what benefits can it bring to you? So that is the key point of my analysis. In this analysis, I will also illustrate the relationship between the miracle mind and awakening and the connotations of the term “Holy Spirit ”.
The origin and meaning of miracle mind: when you, the spirit from Kingdom of God was distracted by a little thought, you mistook yourself for leaving God, and then you projected a universe and lived in it with a series of wrong thoughts. However, this series of changes and results were basically nothing more than a dream that you, the heavenly spirit dreamt of in heaven. So, a series of changes and results did not exist and were meaningless for the kingdom of God, and your spiritual dream was also impossible to appear in the kingdom of God, so when you entered the dream, your God did not Acknowledge the content of your dream, but God knew that you had entered a dream of “being lost” in which you were not feeling well. So your God put a “voice” of awakening you into you at the very moment of you falling into a dream, and this “voice” was called “the Holy Spirit”. And how would the Holy Spirit awaken you? What did he do within you? That is what I am going to focus on.
It started with the moment you entered the dream. When you entered the dreamland, the Holy Spirit followed you into it. But at some point, the Holy Spirit was absolutely different from you in dream. The Holy Spirit knew what was illusory and what was real, because the Holy Spirit came from God. So the moment when you projected the world, the Holy Spirit within you immediately forgave the illusory world and all sentient beings you projected, and he also gave the concept of innocence to all sentient beings. Thus, the miracle mind, the peaceful and abstract unitary state of mind, was first created by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit then awaited you to follow his mode of thought, so that your mind would be reconciled with the miracle mind. So why did the Holy Spirit do this? Because if your mind was reconciled with the miracle mind for a long time, your mind would be chronically “close to” the state of the spirit living in the Kingdom of God. And this kind of long-term “closeness” would generate “qualitative change” at some time, and this “qualitative change” meant that God would pull your mind back into him at some moment, and then your mind would instantly be transformed into a spirit. When that happened, you would wake up from your dream of human life. Not only would you recognize that you were a spirit living in God, but also you would recognize that the world in front of you was a fantasized bubble that did not exist. This is the main benefit that the miracle mind can bring to you: awakening to your truth. Certainly, awakening is just a short-time experience of spiritual transformation, so your body is not going to disappear due to awakening.
In addition to this main benefit, miracle mind will bring you two side benefits.
1.Miracle mind can change destiny. In the previous part I stated that, the guilt in your sub-consciousness would manifest the adversities for you to experience, and the hopes in your sub-consciousness would manifest favourable circumstances for you to experience, but the peaceful miracle mind does not belong to the guilt in the sub-consciousness or hopes in the sub-consciousness, because you acquire the miracle mind through true forgiveness and giving innocence as foundation, so the first fringe benefit that this kind of mind can bring to you is as follows: miracle mind will manifest a new peaceful circumstance for you to experience, and this brand new peaceful circumstance can directly replace the circumstance that the sub-consciousness has designed for you. To specify, when you practice this new thought system in the process of experiencing a life scene and get a miracle mind, the miracle mind will immediately or gradually manifest a new peaceful circumstance for you to experience. At the same time, the adversities that your sub-consciousness has already designed for you will immediately or gradually disappear. Then your destiny has been changed. And after you have experienced this peaceful circumstance, you will not only be deeply aware that you have evaded some adversity, and you will also be surprised that this peaceful circumstance brings you such an unexpected ending to the satisfaction to everybody concerned, which alone can be called a miracle
.
2.The miracle mind can shorten the time you spend in wandering in the dream. Because no new guilt or hopes will appear in your sub-consciousness as you practice this new thought system and attain this miracle mind. Without new guilt and hope, your sub-consciousness will not design new life scenes for you to experience, which will prompt the moment of awakening to come sooner. But this is illustrated from a broad sense. To make a popular metaphor, for example, originally, you should go through five times’ transmigration before awakening, but because you practice this system of thoughts in this life, some of your future life scenes will disappear completely. Then, some future time will disappear together with those scenes; that is to say, you don’t need more time to experience the life scenes that have disappeared, and this will shorten the time of awakening by a few lifetimes.
The information narrated above is the inner connection between the level of spiritual experience and awakening. And this information also explains the general meaning of my main textbook, “A Course in Miracles”: you will get the miracle mind by practicing the mode of thinking described in this course. The primary benefit that this state of mind can bring to you is awakening to your own truth, and the fringe benefit is that it can manifest a peaceful situation for you to experience and shorten the time you spend in wandering in dream.
Hereafter I begin to explain other modes of thinking in this thought system with real life cases, and then I will narrate a real case of myself, because this real case can help you understand all the connotations of the miracle mind and peaceful situation more clearly.
In the previous part, I used a very simple driving example to describe two basic thinking patterns. It is difficult to tell all the other thinking patterns in the case of driving, so this time I will use another life example to explain. The example is as follows:
There was a family of two people, and the husband and the wife were both salary workers. One day, the husband was infatuated with on online games. He played games after coming back home every day. This made his wife upset. Then a few days later, the wife could not stand it any longer, and scolded his husband when he played game, “You just play games every day, and completely ignore me. If you continue to play, you go live with the people in game! You, turn it off now!” When the husband heard this, he got angry and answered, “What’s wrong with me playing games after work? Leave me alone and don’t make troubles”. The case was finished.
In this case, there are only two roles, one attacker and one counter-attacker. These are the two roles you often play in your life.
First, I will analyze the attacker’s thinking and heartfelt feelings:
1.The wife in the case once had a husband who could accompany her every day. Because her husband was infatuated with online games, the husband that could accompany her disappeared. At that moment, there was a certain sense of deprivation in her heart.
2.On the basis of this sense of deprivation, this wife had a certain fear, because she was worried that she would live in a neglected situation for a long time if her husband was obsessed with online games for a long time.
3.The wife also thought that her sense of deprivation and fear were caused by her husband, so she had resentment against her husband.
4.This fear and resentment were repeated and amplified by her husband’s continual playing every day. Finally, when fear and resentment reached the ultimate limit, the wife got angry, and then she attacked her husband and asked him to change into the one who could accompany her.
Those are the complete set of a sense of deprivation, fear, conviction, anger, and thinking of changing others and heartfelt feelings of the attacker. Certainly, sometimes, the wife experiences self-hatred. Because this wife sometimes also thinks, “what was wrong with me at that time, how could I marry him, now I regret so much”. This is the situation that sins are directed at both herself and others.
From the above analysis, we can see that when the wife was hating her husband and attacked him, she would not only experience many negative heartfelt feelings, but also made new sins in her sub-consciousness, and then new sins would fermented new sense of guilt and new circumstances of being punished for her to experience. But in intimate relationships, the circumstances of being punished often happen immediately. This is similar to the situation in this case, when the wife convicted her husband and requested him to correct himself, her husband immediately attacked her and also asked her to change. This is the immediate manifestation of the circumstance of being punished. It is also the norm of people attacking each other in their lives: both sides continually convict each other and demand change, but both sides think the other’s demands are wrong.
After analyzing the attacker, I will analyze the side of counter-attack.
1. In this case, the husband used to have a wife who allowed him to play games, and he thought playing games would brought him a sense of satisfaction. However, that day his wife’s attack on him made him realize that the wife who allowed him to play games disappeared, and at that time he had a sense of deprivation.
2. On the basis of the sense of deprivation, he had two kinds of fears: (1) he was worried that he would not be able to enjoy the satisfaction of playing games in the future. (2) He was afraid that he would become a hen-pecked husband and lose his freedom if he obeyed his wife’s demands.
3. Based on his sense of deprivation and fear, the husband also received the guilt his wife assigned him, which led to his resentment and victimhood, because he always believed that playing games after work was the right thing to do.
4. These feelings of deficiency, fear, resentment, and victimhood turned to anger in an instant, and the expression of that anger usually began with an innocent face presented in front of the other person, and then fought back. So this is the situation in the case. Certainly, the husband’s intention to fight back was clear: he wanted his wife to be someone who gave him freedom and allowed him to play games.
These are the counter-attacker’s set of deficiencies, fear, victim’s emotions, conviction, anger, and thinking of changing others and heartfelt feelings.
After analyzing the mental and spiritual experiences of both parties, you can see a result that both parties have experienced a lot of negative heartfelt feelings and bad situations in this case, which is the result of people being manipulated by the sub-consciousness and living under the conviction mode.
So if you are one of the two roles in the case, what can you do to evade the manipulation of the sub-consciousness? This requires you to practice the thinking of true forgiveness and giving innocence in conjunction with the other two modes of thinking: (letting go and satisfying) demand and entrustment. I will respecitvely put you into the role of the attacking side and the role of the counter-attacking side for illustration.
First of all, I’m going to put you in the role of wife, and if you are the wife in this case, what are you going to do with your husband’s playing online games?
First, it is still vigilance, which means that if you can suddenly realize that you are manipulated by your sub-consciousness in the course of deficiency, fear, resentment again, and that you again take the image and the dream in front of you as real. Then you can stop thinking according to the manipulation of the sub-consciousness, and then you can practice the thinking pattern of true forgiveness and giving innocence; you should think, “the husband in front of me who is playing games is the image made by my sub-consciousness, and only a role in my dream; that he is playing online games is an event in my dream. So I don’t hate this imaginary image in front of me. The true face of my husband is a spirit in heaven. He is within the same God just as I am. He is pure and innocent. He and I have never left the kingdom of god. When you practice in this way, you and your husband will become a peaceful and abstract unitary state of mind: miracle mind.
Then, you need to move on to practice another thinking pattern: letting go of demands. Think about it in this way, “If I need a husband to accompany me and fill my sense of deficiency, this dreamland will redisplay some real meaning to me. That way I’m still being controlled by my sub-consciousness, so I shall choose to let go that demand”. When you think like this without action, the sense of deficiency in your heart will disappear.
Why should you practice letting go of demands? That’s because your self-consciousness has been used to a fixed pattern of “you will pursue something or a relationship in the world because of deficiency”. The problem is that this pattern is a hoax because it directly guarantees the authenticity of deficiency. That is to say, when you are pursuing something due to deficiency, you have already defined your deficiency as true. However, if you have defined your internal deficiency as true, you can no longer satisfy it. Because everything in this world was just an illusory product of the original sense of deprivation after you mistakenly thought that you had left God; that is to say, the original deficiency was not separated from everything in the world. So you couldn’t rely on these illusory products to dissolve that primordial deficiency. This is why you always feel the sense of deprivation whoever you are, no matter how many materials or interpersonal relationships you have, and this is why you “seek but not find”. So if you want to dissolve the sense of deficiency in your heart, you first need to understand in thinking the unity and unreality of deficiency, the self and the world, so that you can use the thought of true forgiveness and letting go of demands to dissolve it.
Fundamentally speaking, practicing and letting go of demands is your imperative way out of your dream. But I’m not asking you to let go of materials that you have and the relationships you have right now. I mean that you just need to understand their illusory nature; because that is the only way that you will not be bound by these illusory things.
After you practice letting go of demands, you may be able to dissolve the sense of deficiency, but the continual fear that it brings you may still remain in your mind. This fear is that you worry your husband will play games unscrupulously every day if you let him play games, which will make your chronically live in a snubbed situation. This is a persistent residual brought by your sense of deficiency. So how do you deal with this continual fear?
Think about it in this way: “if I get snubbed every day by my husband in the future, I accept it, I accept it. Because all the future situations and all the behaviors of my husband are just a dream presented by my sub-consciousness; in the future, no matter how much he is addicted to the Internet, no matter how much he snubs me, I cannot be a victim, and I will always choose to forgive and let go of demands”. When you think like this, your fear of the future will disappear. So why do you think that way?
That is because the law of working of fear in the world is as follows: the more you fear that you will experience a situation in the future, the more real that situation will become in your sub-consciousness, and then it will be manifested into your life. This is the result of the fact that the whole world works within your sub-consciousness, which is also the form and connotation of “what you are afraid of will occur” that common people say.
So if you want to break away from the restraint of the law of fear, what you have to do is to reverse your thinking to confront fear at the moment of fear. The solution is to tell yourself at the moment of fear, “even if some adversity that I fear happens in the future, I accept it. I accept it. Let it be! Because none of these circumstances are real, I am not a victim even if I experience these adversities. And I haven’t left the kingdom of God at all”. That is the main way to break away from fear, and its connotation is to apply the thinking of true forgiveness at the moment of fear to confront some future adversity. After you have practiced this way, some future adversity will increasingly fade away in your sub-consciousness, so that the situation is increasingly unlikely to be experienced by you. Even if you do encounter some adversity after confronting it, your practice won’t be in vain, because it can dramatically reduce the difficulty and complexity of an adversity (within your sub-consciousness). So that this adversity happens, you will find that it is much less difficult, and you will be able to face it leisurely. So the thought pattern of facing fear directly is an important assistance of changing your destiny.
The above thoughts about facing fear directly can be further developed. In this case, if, in addition to your fear that your husband will be playing games every day, you have another fear. For example, you are afraid that your husband’s health will be affected by playing games, or that your husband’s work will be affected by playing games. What do you do about it? Actually the method is the same. You think of all things you fear again at the moment of the fear, and then tell yourself, “even if all the adversity I don’t want to go through happen in the future, I will accept and experience them one by one, because none of these adversities really exists. All your fears will be dissolved at that time.
To sum up, the basis of fear was taking some situation in the future seriously, and the thinking of taking some circumstance real would be controlled by the sub-consciousness. This kind of control would make you perform some mistaken mental judgments and actions at the moment of fear. At last, those mental judgments and actions would lose you in desperation of interpersonal relationships of mutual attack. That is the biggest disadvantage of fear. If you don’t believe it, you can now recall the kind of mentality you have before attacking and hating people.
So the practice of facing fear directly is the most critical step for you to achieve peace of mind. This is the second mode of thinking narrated in this part, called entrustment of fear, which is simplified as ‘entrustment’. This word represents a situation where you can entrust your fear to the thinking of true forgiveness.
Finally, the thinking of entrusting fear has an important role, that is, it can prevent you from evading and forgetting the fear. For example, people often think at the moment of fear, “I’m bored to death. I can’t think about this any more. I can’t stand it. I will deal with it later”. This is a common trick that people use to evade and forget about their fears, but it is a futile one for dissolving fear, because it just shelves them in the sub-consciousness. So, you should stop evading and forgetting about fear, and why are you chased by them? In fact, you who are physically and mentally exhausted just need to face all that you fear directly and then you will find that what you fear is nothing.
These are all the modes of thinking that you need to practice as a wife. After you have finished practicing these modes of thinking, peace will enter your fearless mind. Your husband and you will be firmly united in the miracle mind of peace. Your miracle mind will bestow you an inspiration to do the right thing, which will let you know that you don’t have to do anything. At that time, you don’t have to stop your husband from playing with the computer, nor attack your husband. Then, this miracle mind will immediately or gradually manifest a peaceful circumstance and outcome for you to experience. Certainly, this case is just a case for me to explain, so I can only give a rough idea of this peaceful situation, that is, your husband will probably give up online games by and by, and accompany you more. And you will find that you have gained some benefits and evaded some misfortune after you have experienced the whole peaceful situation. But temporarily I’m not going to use this example to tell you what benefits you will gain and what adversities you will evade. Because I will use a real case of mine to make a targeted explanation, as you can see in the second part.
The practice of above thinking modes can be postponed for beginners. If you have already quarreled with your husband, it’s completely viable to be vigilant and practice all of those thinking modes. Or it can be procrastinated later.
Finally, two points to be stated:
- The entrustment of fear narrated in this part is not completely applicable to the workplace in the world. Because the rules of the workplace are all about respective responsibilities, clear demarcation of the right and the wrong, proper reward and punishment. So, if you fail in your job or make a mistake, you are very likely to be punished or fired even if you consign your fear.
- All the modes of thinking narrated in this part are not applicable to the legal category of the world. The laws of the world is basically a fixed rule of restraining the body made by your sub-consciousness. So, the mode of thinking is not beyond the laws of the world. That is to say, if you do something that violates the law, you will be punished by the law, and put in jail or shot. But the laws of the world bind only the body, but not the mind.
That is the end of the first half. In the second half, I will explain the method as if you played the role of husband.
Chong Weiqiang
August 2017