Here’s another installment in a series of emails that took place between Michael and one of his senior students beginning in August of 2009. May you find the exchange interesting and enriching.
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July 15, 2010
Student: If experience isn’t personal (as in, why me? or, why not me?), then why do so many teachers and psychologists say that our thoughts create experience? Thoughts come from the person, last time I checked. Is it just that experience is not to be ‘taken’ personally?
Michael: Experience is personal when it meets mind. Prior to meeting mind, experience is Being. And yes, the gift we get to bring to experience gets revealed when we dont take its content as a reflection or the result of anything personal. When we bring this gift of openness into whatever circumstance we find ourselves, we meet our lives with a quality of deep intimacy. Choosing to live as this closeness with all things has the potential to change everything. Everything.
Student: Okay, but if there is no one to make the choice, where did it come from? And with this in mind, why are we moved in particular directions?
Michael: While people make choices: ’tis only the mind that moves. And the mind is a personal aspect of the One. Herein lies the fun part. There is one and there is many… all at once. Choice is that very partiality of the many moving as a creative expression of the One.
Student: So is it the mind that engages in that dance of many and One? Does awareness engage through the mind, then?
Michael: The mind is the dance. Awareness never engages. Rather, awareness supports the expression of itself as any movement, much as energy expresses itself through any of us at any moment in time in anything that we do.
Student: So were always dancing.
Michael: We are limitless expressions of the interplay between love and light at every moment. The radiance of this limitlessness is seen by others when our egos stop veiling the love and light that is trying to see itself through them. So get out of the way and watch what happens.