All of my life isn’t real…it seems to me that A Course in Miracles is saying that I don’t really exist…yet here I am existing…

            What A Course in Miracles says is that your experience of yourself as a personal self in a body in a world (ego) is not real existence. It is a false sense of reality (illusion).

            Within you is the solid experience “I am” or “I exist”. This is True Being (God). It is real, infinite, and eternal. You also have this other experience of a limited, time-bound personal self in a body in a world. These two experiences have become conflated in your mind so that you think that the experience of “I exist” refers to the personal self. This confusion is the source of all manifestations of pain. What the Course teaches is that your experience of Existence and your experience of a personal self are actually two disparate experiences. It teaches you how to sort them out so that you can release the false sense of limited identity and know true, infinite, and eternal Being again. This is the only way to lasting peace and happiness.

            The chief tool the Course teaches to sort out these two experiences is the Holy Instant. In the Holy Instant you bring your mind into the present and turn it inward to commune with the simple quiet sense of “I exist” at its center. You drop for a while the personal story and all that comes with it. You rest in True Being. The more you practice this the more you recognize that only True Being is true. You accept that the personal experience is simply a passing idea.

            Your experience of “I exist” is not the limited “I” of “I” alone, one among many. It is the one, universal, limitless “I”. “I exist” is the same in every mind. It is where every mind is One. Everything else is different, separate, temporary, and passes away.