Apparently, the ego has entered the WNBA.

And honestly?

It may be one of the best classrooms it has given us lately. 😂🏀

Recently, a controversy erupted around women's professional basketball after WNBA player Sophie Cunningham publicly expressed her belief that biological males should not compete in women's sports or share locker rooms with girls and women.

Then things got even more interesting.

Former NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White announced they intended to declare themselves eligible for the WNBA draft, essentially applying the logic of gender self-identification to what they saw as its absurd conclusion.

Suddenly, everyone had an opinion.

And while watching all of this unfold, I kept thinking:

What a magnificent classroom for A Course in Miracles.

Because underneath the basketball, politics, gender, biology, fairness, outrage, and endless arguments about who is right...

the ego is doing what the ego has always done.

It takes something simple and makes it extraordinarily complicated.

And the more complicated it becomes, the easier it is to lose sight of what really matters.

The Ego Complicates Because Complexity Gives It Somewhere to Hide

A Course in Miracles tells us:

“The ego analyzes; the Holy Spirit accepts.”
— A Course in Miracles, T-11.V.13

The ego loves analysis.

Definitions.

Categories.

Arguments.

Counterarguments.

Exceptions to the exceptions.

Rules explaining the rules that replaced the previous rules.

And before long, something that once seemed simple requires committees, attorneys, policies, experts, debates, and entire television panels trying to explain what everybody is supposed to think.

The Holy Spirit moves in the opposite direction.

Toward simplicity.

Toward clarity.

Toward Love.

The ego complicates because complexity gives it somewhere to hide.

The Holy Spirit simplifies because Truth has nothing to hide.

But here's where this becomes a spiritual practice rather than merely another cultural debate:

Recognizing confusion doesn't give us permission to condemn the people caught inside it.

Discernment Is Not Judgment

This distinction changed my life.

Discernment can look at something and say:

This doesn't make sense, and can even recognize it as absurd.

Judgment adds:

And therefore, the people doing it are idiots, immoral, unworthy, dangerous, stupid, or undeserving of my Love.

Those are two completely different things.

The Course doesn't ask us to become incapable of recognizing insanity.

It actually teaches us to stop making the insanity real enough to separate us from one another.

And that means we can disagree.

We can recognize contradictions.

We can question policies.

We can advocate for what we believe is fair.

We can even laugh at some of the spectacular contortions the ego manages to perform. 

But if our discernment ends with another child of God becoming less worthy of Love...

the ego just recruited us onto its team.

And that leads to one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves:

Can you see what YOUR ego wants to do with what the other ego is doing?

Because the person saying or doing something you consider absurd may not actually be your lesson.

Your reaction to them may be.

I Learned This Through Ken and Spencer

I didn't learn this intellectually from reading A Course in Miracles.

I lived it.

Ken (my former husband) and Spencer (my son) did things I didn't agree with.

There were behaviors I judged.

I wanted to change some of their choices.

And for years, I unconsciously believed their behavior determined whether my heart could remain open.

Eventually, I learned to look straight through the behavior and remember:

I know who you are.

You are still as God created you.

I don't have to agree with you to remember you.

And then came one of the most profound, humbling moments of my life.

It brought me to my knees.

I realized:

I had the Love I had always been looking for within me.

It had never been missing.

It had never been withheld from me.

I had been blocking my own awareness of it.

I Had Been Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

Like most of us, nobody taught me that Love created me like Itself.

Instead, I had been programmed to look for love out there.

Love me.

Choose me.

Understand me.

Treat me differently.

Apologize.

See my worth.

Change your behavior so that I can feel loved.

Without realizing it, I had placed the key to my heart in someone else's pocket.

And then Ken and Spencer gave me one of the greatest gifts of my life.

They showed me that the key had never been theirs.

It was mine.

My thoughts were the lever.

One thought could close my heart.

Another could open it.

One thought could block my awareness of Christ.

Another could allow the Christ within me to extend.

And suddenly I understood something extraordinarily simple:

If I want to feel Love, I must extend the Love that I AM.

That's how I learned to feel God within me.

Not because Ken changed.

Not because Spencer changed.

Because I did.

And that's when I began to understand how free I had always been.

Does Their Insanity Require Yours?

Now let's go back to basketball. 😂🏀

Someone takes a position you believe is absurd.

Someone says something you consider irrational.

Someone supports something you believe is unfair.

Immediately, the ego says:

“Excellent! Their insanity gives us permission to attack.”

But does it?

Does recognizing what you believe is false require hatred?

No.

Does discernment require condemnation?

No.

Does disagreement require separation?

No.

Does someone else have to remember who they are before you can remember who YOU are?

HELL NO. 😂🔥

That's freedom.

And this is where another Course teaching becomes essential:

“Be vigilant only for God and His Kingdom.”
— A Course in Miracles, T-6.V.C

Vigilance doesn't mean:

Watch carefully for all those crazy people out there.

It means:

Watch carefully which voice you're choosing in here.

Because if I can clearly recognize the ego operating in someone else's mind but fail to recognize my ego's desire to attack them for it...

I haven't escaped the ego.

I've simply switched teams. 🏀

Remember to Laugh

The Course gives us one of its most wonderfully irreverent teachings when it describes the beginning of the separation as:

“a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh.”
— A Course in Miracles, T-27.VIII.6

We forgot to laugh.

And look what happened. 🤪

We made the impossible serious.

We built an entire world around it.

Perhaps part of awakening is remembering how utterly ridiculous the ego becomes once we can see it clearly.

But there is an important distinction.

We can laugh with judgment.

Or:

We can laugh with compassion.

We're not laughing because people are stupid.

We're not laughing at someone's pain.

We're laughing because we recognize the ego's ancient game.

Oh, there you go again.

Separation.

Attack.

Defense.

Right.

Wrong.

Us.

Them.

And now apparently...

WNBA eligibility. 😂🏀

Same ego.

Different costume.

Who Is Your Ken?

Forget basketball for a moment.

Let's bring this home.

Who is your Ken?

Who is doing something right now that you believe is ridiculous, wrong, unfair, immoral, ignorant, selfish, woke, conservative, liberal, unspiritual, insane—or whatever label your ego prefers?

Who needs to change before you'll give yourself permission to be peaceful?

Who needs to apologize?

Who needs to understand you?

Who needs to admit you were right?

Who needs to vote differently?

Who needs to wake the hell up?

Who have you secretly appointed keeper of the key to your heart?

And now ask yourself:

What does MY ego want to do with what their ego is doing?

There's the mirror.

Maybe they're wrong.

Maybe their behavior really is insane.

Maybe your discernment is completely accurate.

But...

Does their insanity require yours?

That question would have changed my life much earlier had I known to ask it.

Because eventually I discovered:

Nobody “out there” can hurt or heal me.

Nobody holds the key to my heart.

Nobody can prevent me from extending the Christ within me.

And nobody else's forgetting requires mine.

Truth Doesn't Need You to Defend It

The Introduction to A Course in Miracles gives us perhaps the simplest statement of all:

“Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.”

Reality doesn't become more real because we scream about it.

It doesn't become less real because someone denies it.

Truth doesn't need a political party.

Truth doesn't require social consensus.

Truth doesn't need the Supreme Court.

Truth doesn't even need Laina Orlando arguing for it. 😂

Truth is true.

The Course actually says exactly that:

“The truth is true. Nothing else matters, nothing else is real, and everything beside it is not there.”
— A Course in Miracles, T-14.II.3

And if Truth doesn't require defense...

neither does Love.

We simply embody it.

I Know Who You Are

So perhaps our greatest spiritual practice isn't becoming exceptionally good at identifying insanity.

The world gives us plenty of opportunities to practice that. 

Perhaps mastery is recognizing insanity without joining it.

Discern without condemning.

Disagree without withdrawing Love.

Laugh without cruelty.

See confusion without making an enemy.

And when someone becomes completely lost inside the ego's maze, perhaps we can look beyond everything they currently believe and quietly remember for them:

I know who you are.

You are still as God created you.

I don't have to agree with you to remember you.

Because eventually I learned to offer myself exactly the same grace.

I didn't have to agree with my ego's behavior to remember what remained untouched beneath it.

Love created me like Itself.

And Love created you like Itself too.

Whether either of us remembers it today changes absolutely nothing about the Truth.

The ego has entered the WNBA.

Fine. 😂🏀

The only question that matters is whether we're going to enter our ego with it.

Because awakening isn't finally arranging the world so perfectly that nobody behaves insanely enough to disturb our peace.

Awakening is discovering that their insanity never possessed the power to make us withhold the Love we are.

And maybe that's the greatest punchline of this entire crazy human adventure:

The Love I spent my life searching for was the Love doing the searching!

It sure is fun being a human right now!

With joy,