God goes with me wherever I go.
Because God is with us, all we need to do in a dream of separation is question the dream’s reality. Love dissolves the appearance of separate lives and experiences, and restores to mind awareness of our one life in God.
The myriad experiences of pain and loss we experience as “separated ones” are all dispatched with equal efficiency. They are not different problems with different effects and different levels of intensity. They are merely symptoms of our confused self-identity.
We are healed when we remember what we are in truth.
Deep within you is everything that is perfect, ready to radiate through you and out into the world. It will cure all sorrow and pain and fear and loss because it will heal the mind that thought these things were real, and suffered out of its allegiance to them (W-pI.41.3:1-2).
This is true because we cannot be apart from our Source, which is “all joy” (W-pI.41.4:2) and “all life (W-pI.41.4:3). Our peace of mind remains perfectly still and undisturbed because we cannot be separate from God (W-pI.41.4:4). We don’t have to do anything other than see rightly what is already given.
This is not the truth of the self that believes it is permanently attached to a body in a world where bodies suffer and eventually die. This is not the truth of a mind which believes in scarcity, guilt and pain. We need to be clear about this! We need to be honest about what our experience is, and not cloud it with what we want it to be.
We want to face the grim facts of imprisonment and exile, in order not to underestimate the requisite release and healing, and in order to call upon the right savior.
Lesson forty is an invitation to perceive without fear the “dark and heavy cloud” (W-pI.41.5:3) that obscures truth and to pass through it to “the light beyond” (W-pI.41.5:3).
This is another way of saying that the separation never happened. We can deny and ignore it, we can obfuscate it – but we cannot destroy it. We have built a heavy cloud over our oneness with God – a complex web of false ideas, dissonant voices, haunted and haunting images – but it is within our power to slip through it. Are we willing?
Healing begins in honesty. Honesty allows us to begin at the beginning, which is where the error of mistaken identity is at last seen and given to be corrected.
This lesson also begins a form of study that resembles the Christian tradition of contemplative prayer. We are quiet and still, turning inward, away from the world and its concerns, away even from the self who wants to be free of the world and its concerns. We are “trying to leave appearances and approach reality” (W-pI.41.7:4).
That last sentence is a powerful teaching moment. It allows to see the self and world as “appearances” rather than reality, and invites us to find “reality” apart from them. It is like suggesting that we cannot find ourselves in a mirror – all that we will see there is an appearance, a reflection. The real self is not “in” the mirror.
If this is confusing at this juncture, that’s okay. It’s more than okay. But the course reminds us that reaching God in this way – in this contemplative mode – is neither mysterious or difficult but rather “the most natural thing in the world” (W-pI.41.8:2).
The way will open if you believe that it is possible . . . it will never fail completely, and instant success is possible (W-pI.41.8:4, 7).
It doesn’t take years of arduous meditation. We don’t have to suffer or deprive ourselves. We don’t have to crawl on our knees through cut glass. We simply have to believe that reaching God is possible. That’s it. If we believe it – if we truly, for one split second, believe this – then the way is open and we will be restored to remembrance of oneness.
This is our comfort and our certainty that we are not praying and studying in vain. The promise of A Course in Miracles – the peace of joy of undivided Creation – is already given. It is already true. God is with us because what we are cannot be apart from God.
There is no fear. There is only love. In this lies our truth and our salvation.
“Love dissolves the appearance of separate lives and experiences, and restores to mind awareness of our one life in God.” I had a moment where the web of ideas about love dissolved as I read that sentence. God goes with me wherever I go, so NOW I can forget those wherevers and then even that prompt. Reminds me of “a day at time” in recovery. The elephant in the room there is pretending that a day was somehow more manageable than other periods of time. Instead, the “trick” was in dropping any worry or false beliefs that aren’t the condition of Now, whatever propmt helps point in that “direction”, and only because it’s accepted from its destination of Now.
Beautiful! Because it’s true and true because it works 🙂
Hope all is well Mike!
When I sat down to meditate on today’s lesson it came to me that God is with us wherever we go because God is the capacity for great love. We always have that capacity, we just need to
choose to embody it.
Thank you Nancy 🙏
~ Sean