In and Out of the Hologram, Vivace

As promised, Gary Renard introduced us to his "Arten," aka Cindy on the "Happy Dream" Cruise, and this continues the important story line of his living experience as a demonstration project of the holographic nature of our experiential world which A Course in Miracles proposes. At the end of his first book as Arten and Pursah made it clear who they were in relation to Gary -- having been the apostles Thomas and Thaddeus in the past, while Gary himself had also been Thomas -- they also made it clear that not only would he be Pursah (a woman) in the next life, but he would end up marrying Arten, however Arten in his current lifetime would thus be a woman, who at that time he had not met yet. At some later time Gary reported having met the current-life persona of Arten, and that her identity would be disclosed in the third book, Love Has Forgotten No One, and also that she would participate in this year's Caribbean cruise. And so, having participated in the cruise, I've also met Cindy. Apparently Gary knew she was Arten before she did herself, but she was comfortable with it coming out in this fashion, and she seems to play the part really well. Meanwhile the really nice thing is that they do not make a big deal out of this, for they realize fully that this is all merely part of the dream reality. Needless to say undue hoopla about past life memories can become a major distraction, if it is exploited by the ego to make us somehow special, as is discussed in the Course in the Manual for Teachers, in the chapter 'ARE "PSYCHIC" POWERS DESIRABLE?' here:

The answer to this question is much like the preceding one. There are, of course, no "unnatural" powers, and it is obviously merely an appeal to magic to make up a power that does not exist. It is equally obvious, however, that each individual has many abilities of which he is unaware. As his awareness increases, he may well develop abilities that seem quite startling to him. Yet nothing he can do can compare even in the slightest with the glorious surprise of remembering Who he is. Let all his learning and all his efforts be directed toward this one great final surprise, and he will not be content to be delayed by the little ones that may come to him on the way. (ACIM:M-25.1)

The bottom line here clearly is that since with more and more forgiveness our fear level goes down, and we may well remember some of these abilities including past-life memories, which heretofore in our current living experience had been repressed, but if our ego gets ahold of them and starts exploiting them, we take our eyes off the ball, and forget the one responsibility we have as students of the Course, i.e. accepting the atonement for ourselves. And so, as always, the point is to leave the rest of it to the Holy Spirit, including the use of any such new found talents. Gary gave us a funny description of his own association with the group of Return of the Revolutionaries, which seems to be very prone to inspiring people to take this much too seriously--and again we are reminded of the joke that seriousness causes reincarnation. If nothing else, one thing that should give us pause is the fact that very few people volunteer for past life memories as Hitler, Attila the Hun, or Judas Iscariot, whereas the more popular roles seem to be in high demand. From the point of view of the Course it should be evident that the lifetimes in which we were villains of various sorts are very important lessons indeed, to make us aware of why the ego thought system is really a thought system of murder, which perhaps we would rather give up. For similar reasons, we strongly repress all memories of lifetimes in which we were something that we hate in this lifetime, e.g. men/women, black/white, Jew/Arab, etc. while the very fact that we hate it so much only means one thing, namely exactly that we were it, and do not want to know, so we project it out there in the world as an object of our scorn.

In the discussions in the workshop some interesting points about all this came out, and I would like to summarize them here in my own words. With a look ahead to the new book, Gary pointed out that Arten and Pursah had given him a demonstration of the "in-between" life, the upshot of which clearly was that, just like our own dreaming experience happens in seconds, but within the dream seems to cover vast stretches of time, the in-between life is typically really short, and moreover our "next" lifetime is not necessarily "in the future" in the time scale we tend to conceive of if we focus on our life as bodies in the world. In other words, you could be having a few hours in-between and then continue in a lifetime that is 100 years from now, or 2,000 years ago, the selection of which is predicated on what is the most helpful as classrooms for your progress on the road to salvation. Likewise, within the script we are currently in, we cannot so much change the script as shift to another dimension, based on the forgiveness lessons we have learned. In the end it is really not much different from going to Blockbusters and deciding between a horror movie or a comedy. In that sense the "hologram" is not much more than a large multiplex cinema, where I can see lots of different movies without ever leaving the building, and we only leave the building when our forgiveness lessons are done. And from one lifetime to the next we can change sex, religion, race, etc. so we shift from man to woman, from Muslim to Christian, from Jew to Arab, from black to white an vice versa. All of this makes lots of sense, since the atonement process is really about forgiving our apparent differences in the world and coming to realize experientially that we are the One sonship, that appears as many only because we have embraced the separation thought, the ego, and conceive of our living reality/experience accordingly.

Lastly, there is the important implication of the Course that all of the perceptions within this holographic time/space framework are in the mind, including our own body, therefore it becomes blatantly clear how and why it is possible to experience these shifts, that otherwise seem inconceivable to our conscious awareness which has projected the neat linear appearance of ourselves in time, with a past and a future, and which we call our life. And the shifts within this life to different dimensions with different outcomes are again no different than a DVD with multiple endings to the movie. Thus we do not perse change the script with our actions, as it is already made, and all of our actions are in the pre-recorded script, but by forgiving we can shift to a different experience. Or, as the Course puts it:  "Therefore, seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the world." (ACIM:T-21.in.1:7)