YOU ARE EXISTENCE ITSELF

You are Existence Itself

Question: A Course in Miracles says that I did not affect my own
reality at all by illusions. What would you share regarding this
thought?

Answer: Do not confuse reality with illusions. You are thinking that
you were born, and now you have the opportunity to be saved. [And
you are thinking] that this birth of you and the opportunity for
your salvation would not exist had it not been for illusions. You
are thinking that since you are a product of [the thought of]
separation, you exist because of illusions. This is but a confusion
regarding who you are.

You are existence itself. You existed before illusions seemed to be
and your existence is assured after illusions are forgotten. This is
why I say you are eternal. Your existence is free of pain, fear and
worry, all of which seem to be a part of the consciousness of which
you think you are now. It is the seeming individual consciousness
that is illusion, and this illusion is not you because it is not
existence. It is an illusory consciousness that has been laid on top
of existence through imaginings.

You try to imagine yourself without imagings. This cannot be done,
for illusory consciousness does not remember existence without
consciousness, and so it cannot imagine it. Because you believe that
consciousness is what you are and that all experience must come from
being conscious, it seems that existence without consciousness must
be death. But how can existence be death? And if existence is death,
how could it have made consciousness?

Existence is a peacefulness and wholeness that your consciousness
cannot imagine. This [fact] I ask you to accept in faith and trust.
To try to imagine existence without consciousness is to continue to
exercise consciousness and to retain [consciousness] as your seeming
identity. To know your Self as existence, you must relax and let go
of consciousness.

This is why I ask you to focus on the moment, the now. Existence is
now, whereas consciousness seems to be all over the place and
nowhere at the same time. It strives to control the past and the
future, this imagining and that [imagining] all at once. In its
striving, it spins and spins missing the fact of reality by striving
within its fantasies. To let go of this striving is to be, and to be
is existence.

This is something you can do, even within the dream. And as you be
within the dream, you cease to exercise consciousness so that it
slows down, quiets and dies. But after consciousness dies, you still
are, so you must not have been consciousness . And this that you are
always was, so that it was not affected by the insane consciousness
that seemed to be you for a little while.

Consciousness is like a mask that you wear, and it seems to be
something and to be alive, but when the mask is taken off and laid
aside, it is nothing. You are what is behind the mask. You were
there before the mask was put on. You are there now, under the mask.
And you continue when the mask has been laid aside.