Choose Your Teacher

Consider this radical proposition: every word you speak, every emotion that surfaces, every reaction that flares isn't actually under your control. What if the "you" you think you are is simply experiencing the downstream effects of a choice being made at a much deeper level?

Think about your last emotional reaction—perhaps frustration with a colleague's email or joy at hearing from an old friend. Did you consciously decide to feel that way? Or did the emotion simply arise, and then you claimed ownership? "I am frustrated." "I am delighted!" But who determined that frustration or delight should emerge in that moment?

The truth is startling: everything we experience flows through us as effects. The real choice happens somewhere else entirely, at a level most of us rarely consider—within the mind itself.

At this deeper stratum, there's only one choice being made moment by moment: which teacher we're learning from. We're either selecting the ego's classroom of separation and grievance, or we're choosing love's syllabus of healing and wholeness.

Choose the ego as instructor, and predictable lessons follow: judgment, anxiety, the endless pursuit of specialness. These thoughts and feelings aren't personally authored—they're simply the natural curriculum of that particular teacher flowing through awareness.

Choose love as guide, and something entirely different moves through us: joy, compassion, peace, the recognition of shared innocence.

As A Course in Miracles reveals: "Every decision you make stems from what you think you are, and represents the value that you put upon yourself."

We imagine we're choosing words, actions, and responses. But we're actually choosing teachers. Everything else follows automatically.

Join me in Thursday's class where we'll explore this profound distinction between the choices we think we make and the Choice that actually determines everything. I look forward to seeing you then.