You Can End Your Separation from God Now

If God is, and we are not experiencing God, then we have interjected something between ourselves and God. It is not an object though it may certainly appear that way. It is simply the idea that we can be separated from God. That is all. If we can liberate ourselves from the tyranny of that one idea, then we will know the peace and joy of God.

And yes, I know. Easy to say, hard to do.

But that is the promise of A Course in Miracles! And it is backed up by a curriculum that will assist us in the necessary liberation. The hard part is letting go of the world and turning inward. That interior landscape – of ideas, of images, of fantasies – can seem unwieldy indeed! Yet it is only there that meaningful help can come. And it is there that the necessary undoing will be accomplished – in us and through us, but not by us. Not like that.

When I say let go of the world, I mean only to withdraw one’s investment in it. To let go of the idea that external circumstances can be the cause of anything. The Course does not advocate asceticism. You don’t have to swear off cheesecake, do yoga three hours a day and Tantric meditation the other twenty-one. Sackcloth and ashes are not required. You are allowed to live your life in the world.

You are simply asked to consider seeing that life a little differently.

How does this work? We allow the Holy Spirit to see for us. We allow the Holy Spirit to offer guidance – where to go, what to say, who to see. Don’t complicate this. Don’t make it so metaphysical and abstract that you can’t decide whether to brush your teeth or not. The Holy Spirit is just that part of your mind that remembers God. The ego is a way of thinking without God; the Holy Spirit thinks with God. It’s a gift and it was given to you. More than that, it was given to you to be used.

So use it! Find a way to make this possible.

I’m a word guy. I talk a lot and I write a lot. So I believe in talking to God, talking to Jesus, talking to the late Tara Singh, who is my teacher, talking to the Holy Spirit. I ask for a lot help. And the help comes.

And I am here to tell you that as time passes, and as my faith and my practice deepen, the help doesn’t leave. I don’t have to talk it through as much. I can relax into the Presence.

I am learning to experience God as eternally present and conditioned on nothing but willingness.

The Presence – call it God, call it Source, call it what you like – is not contingent on external circumstances. It is as consistent and supportive and lovely in the forest as in traffic. It’s not out there. It’s inside. When you make contact with it, whatever appears to be outside is transformed. It has no power over you. It is beautiful and nurturing because that is how the Presence “sees.” You move through it – interact with it – but it’s all changed. It doesn’t seem as important or as real.

Navigating the internal landscape is not easy. In fact, it can be so terrifying and apparently challenging that returning to the external world can seem very reasonable! The interior is filled with fear and guilt. Images from the past haunt us – choices not made or made poorly, times we were victims and times we did the victimizing ourselves. Dread and gloom shade the future. Who needs it?

But that’s where the willingness comes in.

Can you let what you experience inside be? Can you look at the sludge and ugliness and just let it be? It’s not your job to fix it or heal it. The Holy Spirit will shine it away. All you need to do is come to that place where you allow that function to be fulfilled on your behalf.

Bringing illusion to truth, or the ego to God, is the Holy Spirit’s function. Keep not your making from your Father, for hiding it has cost you knowledge of Him and yourself. The knowledge is safe but where is your safety apart from it? (T-14.IX.1:4-6)

Spend a few minutes in meditation whenever possible. Don’t worry about getting it right. Right and wrong are not helpful ideas when it comes to God. Just be still – sitting, standing, walking, kneeling. Whatever. And let your mind do what it does: let it fill with the horror show. Let it be all judgmental and cruel. Let it be silly or boring.

And say: here you go, Jesus. Say: this one’s for you Holy Spirit.

Maybe not this hour and maybe not today even but soon you will discover that Jesus and the Holy Spirit are not simply metaphors. You will encounter an internal light – faint, flickering, tiny – and it will heal you. Slowly it will heal you. I feel completely comfortable promising you this is so!

Don’t run away from what scares you. Don’t hide from how horrible you think you are or how terrifying the world is or how rotten other people are. Give it over. In words, with images, in prayer. Sing it out loud if you have to! But find that willingness. A spark is all that is need to start the conflagration. Let go.

The Atonement does not make holy. You were created holy. It merely brings unholiness to holiness, or what you made to what you are (T-14.IX.1:1-3).

What you made to what you are . . . God created you perfect and you remain the perfect Creation of God. Find the truth of that! Everything else is of your own making. Let the many obstructions you made go. Undo the separation by accepting that it never happened. Let the One whose job it is to teach you that truth teach it to you.

And like that, you will be home.

Stillness in A Course in Miracles

Psalm 46 includes one of my favorite lines from the old testament: Be still, and know that I am God. Even as a child that appealed to me. It reminded me of forests and pastures. It reminded me that God seemed to go with me everywhere.

It begins with a heartfelt recognition that God is intimately connected to the ground of our being. When we are in contact with God, we cannot be shaken regardless of what tempests rage in the external world.

God is our refuge and strength,
an ever-present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way
and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam
and the mountains quake with their surging.

It is very much a song about the awesome extent of God’s power. On the one hand, he can bring desolation to the earth. On the other, he can end the wars which storm across it. And it offers one simple directive for knowing this all-powerful God: Be still. That’s all. In stillness, we know God.

A Course in Miracles echoes that theme.

Only be still and listen. You will hear the Word in which the Will of God the Son joins in his Father’s Will, at one with it, with no illusions interposed between the wholly indivisible and true (W-pI.125.9:3-4).

Stillness and quiet: these are the conditions in which and by which we know God. We don’t have to do anything else. No prayer, no ritual, no formal meditation positions. We merely enter that deep silence and listen in faith. We will know God there. Neither the psalmist nor the Author of the Course equivocate on this point.

Stillness and quiet, of course, are more than being sure that the television is off. They mean something different than just not moving. The truth is that we can come to sacred stillness on a busy city street – horns honking, engines blaring, sirens wailing. We can come to it while walking or dancing or kneading bread dough.

It is a quality of attention, a way of being present to what is. It is our ability to maintain a devoted concentration on our desire to know God. When knowledge of God is our sole objective, the externals – be they soup that’s a tad too cold, a breathtakingly beautiful sunset or a violent hurricane uprooting trees – become irrelevant. They cannot reach us. We are in the stillness that is God. We have become that stillness.

He speaks from nearer than your heart to you. His Voice is closer than your hand. His Love is everything you are and that He is; the same as you, and you the same as he (W-pI.125.7:2-4).

This is the secret that renders relationship with God practical and accessible. God is not a mystery to be unraveled by priests and scholars. God is not a gift given to few Holy saints secluded in convents and monasteries. You yourself are the peace for which you long. It is inside you as a condition of your being. You are not – you never were and you never can be – apart from God. In stillness, you remember this. In stillness, you accept it.

It is your voice to which you listen as He speaks to you (W-pI.125.8:1).

Sean isn’t God. The you you think that you are – this body, this personality, this history – isn’t God. Rather, the stillness inside us – the deep center from which all peace springs – is God. It is there waiting for us. It never changes. It saves us from the world and it saves us from the mortal self in which we have so long been deceived.

So practice that stillness. Make it your present reality. Every second in its presence is transformational. The separation ends. You know you are forever Home.

A Course in Miracles Lesson 151

All things are echoes of the Voice for God.

Be careful! The lesson doesn’t teach that things are echoes of God – it teaches that all things are echoes of the Voice for God, which is the Holy Spirit. The temptation is to try and bring God into the world – to see God as having agency and intelligence. But this world is a dream, already passing. God is beyond it. Here, in the dream, God’s Word is given through the Holy Spirit – the part of our mind that remembers what we are in truth, and accepts no substitute for what it knows.

Therefore, he Holy Spirit is our guide for understanding the world wrought by separation, and for knowing what to do within it, so long as we believe we are in it.

The world we perceive is based on our senses, which are themselves judgmental and partial. Even something as simple as a buttercup, which we take for granted, is something else to a cow, and something else yet again to a butterfly. Your perspective is always partial, and always slanted to your need to survive. This might temporarily serve the body’s interest in not dying, but you and I are not bodies.

You place pathetic faith in what your eyes and ears report. You think your fingers touch reality, and close upon the truth. This is awareness that you understand, and think more real than what is witnessed to by the eternal Voice for God Himself (W-pI.151.3:5-7).

We live in that world – we obey the laws of that world – and all of it merely reflects our belief in the judgments of ego, all of which are false (W-pI.151.4:4). Under ego’s interpretation, the world we perceive reinforces our vulnerability and sinfulness, and ultimately the inevitability of punishment for our guilt. It is a dark and hopeless construction.

There is – there is always – another way. Students of A Course in Miracles should have that tattooed someplace prominent. It really is the foundation of our practice and study.

. . . you must learn to doubt their (ego and body senses) evidence will clear the way to recognizing yourself, and let the Voice for God alone by Judge what is worthy of your own belief . . . He recognizes only what God loves, and in the holy light of what He sees do all the ego’s dreams of what you are vanish before the splendor He beholds (W-pI.151.7:1, 4).

It is helpful to remember that the above passage revolves not around how we see ourselves – or a buttercup, say – but rather how we see our brothers and sisters. It is our judgment of them which we need to release, in order to see in them only what God sees, and thus recognize our savior at last.

Heaven is the home of perfect purity, and God created it for you. Look on your holy brother, sinless as yourself, and let him lead you there (T-22.II.13:6-7).

Is it clear? We recognize our savior because we recognize ourself. Of our own, we can recognize this. We are too confused, too distracted, too vain, too scared. That is why A Course in Miracles teaches us how to hear only the Holy Spirit, who knows exactly how to make God’s perfect love clear to us in a loveless place.

He will remove all faith that you have placed in pain, disaster, suffering and loss. He gives you visions which can look beyond these grim apperances, and can behold the gentle face of Christ in all of them. You will no longer doubt that only good can come to you who are beloved of God, for He will judge all happenings, and teach the single lesson that they all contain (W-pI.151.10:1-3).

We experience this as an interpretation. As the ego told us what the world meant, now we listen to another Voice, and accept its meaning rather than our own. Ego speaks for survival, because fear is its reality. The Holy Spirit speaks for sharing and extension, because it knows that Love, not fear, is all the reality there is. Thus, we literally “see the love beyond the hate, the constancy in change, the pure in sin, and only Heaven’s blessing on the world” (W-pI.151.11:3). Can you imagine how this feels?

It feels like salvation. It feels like being born again.

That is why ACIM calls this “resurrection” – not the rising again of the body after death, but rather the realization that our life “stands beyond the body and the world” altogether (W-pI.151.12:2). This realization – this resurrection, which is internal, of the mind – reveals the face of Christ in all things, and removes all doubt in us about the sanctity and accessibility of God’s Will.

Today, we turn our minds over to our Creator, and ask that every thought be cleansed and purified of ego’s mistaken reading, so that the light of Love will be all that remains in each of them. Today we remember the peace of our creator, as a gift to us, which extends through us to all the world. In this way are all minds healed and unified “into a perfect Thought that offers its perfection everywhere” (W-pI.151.14:4).

This lesson reveals to us our ministry as students of A Course in Miracles. We are healed in order to bear witness to healing – to “carry round the world the joyous news that truth has no illusions, and the peace of God, through us, belongs to everyone” (W-pI.151.17:3).

This is our function now, not to be taken lightly. Let us learn how to gaze on our brothers and sisters as our saviors, and then accept the salvation they offer us, that we might extend it throughout the cosmos, a “gift of snow-white lilies” (W-pI.151.16:2) restoring to all minds their innocence and wholeness in Love.

←Lesson 150
Lesson 152→

A Course in Miracles Lesson 150

My mind holds only what I think with God.

I will accept Atonement for myself (Lesson 139).
Only salvation can be said to cure (Lesson 140).

In a sense, we cannot accept Atonement for anyone but our own self. Yet in another sense, when we accept it for ourselves, we accept it for everyone. We are healed collectively, not individually. We “dwell in the Mind of God with our brother, for God Himself does not will to be alone” (T-11.I.1:6).

In truth, Lesson 139 is a gentle reminder of the need to be responsible for our own minds, and the effects of the thoughts we choose to think. To be responsible means to take others into consideration – to be aware of them, to hold them as equals, and to care about what happens to them. Mind is shared, not separate. Of course we ought to be responsible.

We are not saved alone, and yet the decision to be healed begins in our mind, with our unwillingness to continue suffering the ego’s self-perpetuating nightmare of separation. This is less about making a choice, then it is about accepting the simple truth of what we are. It is an acceptance of God’s Will rather than our own.

Only acceptance can be asked of you, for what you are is certain. It is set forever in the holy Mind of God, and in your own (W-pI.139.8:1-2).

When we remember who we are, we are blessed with happy dreams, which precede – which hasten and facilitate – our return to God.

The happy dreams the Holy Spirit brings are different from the dreaming of the world, where one can merely dream he is awake. The dreams forgiveness lets the mind perceive do not induce another form of sleep . . . (W-pI.140.3:1-2).

The emphasis here is on what our lives begin to look like as we accept the Holy Spirit’s guidance, and make our living more and more about our shared interest with our brothers and sisters. True joy arises in helping others, and in joining them in our journey away from fear and towards love. It becomes our journey, rather than my journey or your journey.

In a sense, healing is the happy dream that salvation is – a way of living out in the world the understanding that we are not bodies and there is no world. Salvation is the clear and quiet confidence that God’s Will is sufficient, and that our own will can be gently set aside.

Salvation heals the split mind that believes it is separate, and as its effects are undone, we wear the body and the world lighter and lighter. There is nothing to do, for it is all being done, perfectly. We accept this, and lean into the grace that acceptance establishes.

The only problem we have is the belief that we are separate from creation and from our creator. This is the root cause of all our seeming problems and all our apparent illnesses. Therefore, curing it is the solution to all problems and illnesses, ours and the world’s alike.

←Lesson 149
Lesson 151→

A Course in Miracles Lesson 149

My mind holds only what I think with God.

When I am healed, I am not healed alone (Lesson 137).
Heaven is the decision I must make (Lesson 138).

Because we are not separate, when we heal, our healing touches all of life. In a sense, to heal is to join with our brothers and sisters, and to remember our shared guiltlessness together with them.

. . . see the Love of God in you, and you will see it everywhere because it is everywhere. See His abundance in everyone, and you will know that you are in Him with them. They are part of you, as you are part of God (T-7.VII.10:4-6).

To remember our innocence in Creation, and our shared unity as extension of Love, is what it means to be healed, because the memory of innocence dissolves the separation and all its apparent effects. In a sense, healing is a form of responsibility unto our brothers and sisters (broadly defined to include skunks, birch trees and asteroids).

In other words, this remembrance is active; it is a way of being in the world. It is a way of meeting one another and relating to one another that places the other’s well-being above our own, because we know that anything we give to the other, we give to ourselves. It’s not a painful giving, but a joyous one, a liberating one.

The gifts you offer to the ego are always experienced as sacrifices, but the gifts you offer to the Kingdom are gifts to you. They will always be treasured by God because they belong to His beloved Sons, who belong to Him (T-7.VII.11:4-5).

This is why we say that Heaven – a state of happiness because it is a state of remembered oneness, in which differences and valuation are entirely undone – is a decision that we must make. Really, we are saying that we have to want happiness more than we want to suffer. So we are looking at the ego’s thought system and seeing that it does not offer us peace and joy. In fact, it can’t. Understanding this is essential to awakening.

Perceive any part of the ego’s thought system as wholly insane, wholly delusional and wholly undesirable and you have correctly evaluated all of it. This correction enables you to perceive any part of creation as wholly real, wholly perfect and wholly desirable (T-7.VII.11:1-2).

To see through ego is to see clearly, as through a lens of forgiveness, the real world where there is no loss and everything shines forever (T-13.VII.1:6-7). Wanting only this, we have only this, and having only this, we can offer only this. Offering it to our brothers and sisters is how we learn that we have it.

In this way, those who share this life with us – at the kitchen table, in the grocery store, on the highway in passing – confirm our holiness as we confirm theirs. It is a lovely, life-giving cycle of affirmation, in which together we remind ourselves that nothing happened and we remain as God created us.

Each lesson of A Course in Miracles is an opportunity to be healed of guilt, and of the fear, anger and hatred that are its bitter fruits. We do this by remembering that we go together, not alone, on this healing journey, and that the only decision we need to make is the decision to follow the Holy Spirit, who is the Voice for God.

Let us make it for one another today, and thus empower each other to offer the gift to everyone we meet today, friend and stranger alike. Our gentle recognition of each other as saviors is what save us. Let us assume no other burden but this one today, and thus learn it is not a burden at all but a joy.

←Lesson 148
Lesson 150→

A Course in Miracles Lesson 148

My mind holds only what I think with God.

If I defend myself I am attacked (Lesson 135).
Sickness is a defense against the truth (Lesson 136).

The reason that self-defense is a form of attack is because we are not bodies (W-pI.199.8:7) and the world is not real (W-pI.132.6:2). What is one with God, one without another, cannot be attacked – there is nobody and nothing to do the attacking. Nor is there any separate entity to be attacked.

Thus, there is no such thing as attack unless the mind believes there is, in which case it violates its own wholeness, which is infinite and eternal, by believing it is something it is not, i.e., a body.

That is what we call the separation, and its effects are painful indeed. And there is a better way.

It is interesting to consider how these two lessons – 135 and 136 – fit together. The first teaches us that we can only attack our own self and the second makes the curious argument that sickness is a form of attack. What does this mean? What are we supposed to learn here?

Sickness is a form of attack because it reflects the underlying belief that the body is real and that what happens to it has value for its own sake. Its only value is the extent to which it can be used to wake you up from the dream of separation. In and of itself it is neutral.

But the sickness – and the body apparently afflicted – do not exist in the real world. Therefore, we have to let go of our attachment to preferential narratives and narrative structures. We have to be willing to see what happens when we do not insist that reality must be this or that, have this meaning or that.

We are the ones hurting our self! That’s the bad news. The good news is, since we are the ones doing it we can also be the ones who stop doing it.

Our minds holds only what we think with God, which is another way of saying that God’s Mind is what our mind is. This is not comprehensible to those who still believe in separation, because it seems to involve to separate levels (spirit and matter) interacting in ways that inform both.

But the level of spirit has no form, and the level of form has no meaning, other than the illusory meaning we give it. Today then, let us let God direct our minds, using them to create as the Infinite creates, and to extend love as Love extends. Let us discover what the world shows us when God – not you and I – are accepted as Author without qualification or condition.

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