Sean Reagan

I will accept Atonement for myself.

Atonement is the means by which we remember what we are in truth and, in remembering that, remember that all creation is united with us, and that our shared union is our identity in God. Thus, what we remember for ourselves, we remember for all. This is the end of fear and the beginning of love.

Today’s lesson makes a persuasive argument that remembering what we are is not actually difficult. We cannot be other than what we are! To think otherwise is merely to play a game. But we can take that game seriously – we can take it so seriously that we forget it’s a game.

This forgetfulness – which is a really a form of adverse self-judgment – is the source of all grief and conflict, on all apparent scales.

When we pretend that we do not know what we are, says the course, it merely shows that we do not want to be the thing that we are. We have essentially denied ourselves – like Peter unto Jesus – and all our self-seeking – however earnest, however disciplined, however spiritual – is merely a means of upholding that denial.

In denial we are unsure of what we are. This uncertainty breeds defensiveness and attack. Scared of what we might be, we project those fears and dark fantasies onto our brothers and sisters. Despair and anger are the world’s hallmarks, each warring against the other in a vain attempt to answer a question that cannot be answered because to ask it is to answer it.

Atonement remedies the strange idea that it is possible to doubt yourself, and be unsure of what you really are. This is the depth of madness. Yet it is the universal question of the world. What does this mean except the world is mad? Why share the madness in the sad belief that what is universal here is true? (W-pI.139.6:1-5)

In order to question ourself, we must exist. To ask how can I be, I must first be. The dead cannot ask questions about their lives. Only the living can pose a question, and they can only pose it to the living. Self-doubt and uncertainty are impossible; they are illusions undertaken by minds which have become so utterly deluded they can no longer discern between what is true and what is false.

In stillness – committed to learing the truth of our identity and resolved to no longer be the author of pain and suffering, ours and everyone else’s – let us give attention to our mind. What is holy there? Who decides? Where did this holiness come from? If we want to say it comes from someone other than our own self, then how do we know it is holy?

Can you find the stillness that does not question but simply knows?

Note that today’s lesson does not want us to engage in rhetoric or wordplay. It is not about being right about the metaphysics. Beyond logic and semantics can be found a clear stillness that knows with calm certainty it is an extension of God’s Will in Creation. We do not need to do anything other than accept this certainty. In truth, we cannot do more. There is nothing more.

When this is seen clearly, it is also seen clearly that this insight is not personal. It is not a statement about Sean but about life itself. And life is not broken into many parts but is one-without-another. Therefore, all creation is included in our remembrance of our self as an extension of God’s joyous creation.

This does Atonement teach, and demonstrates the Oneness of God’s Son is unassailed by his belief he knows not what he is. Today accept Atonement, not to change reality, but merely to accept the truth about yourself, and go your way rejoicing in the endless Love of God (W-pI.139.10:1-2).

We remain as God creates us; can God be wrong? We can be confused and deluded about ourselves, but we cannot make the truth untrue, any more than we make what is false the truth.

Therefore, in gratitude for our Creator – and in praise of all Creation, which is one with us – we turn our mind to what it knows without any qualification or condition: we remain as God created us (e.g., W-pI.139.11:3). Atonement is the grace in which we remember this at last.

←Lesson 138
Lesson 140→

Heaven is a decision I must make.

In the body there is nothing to do. No hill to climb, no race to run, no job to finish. But in the mind there is a decision and the decision is to know ourselves as we are in Creation. Any other choice brings only illusions in which we can wander a long time, lost and unhappy and confused.

Lesson 138 reminds us of our responsibility to decide, and makes clear what we are deciding for: Heaven, which is the memory of oneness brought to light in the world of separation, and thus proving that separation is an illusion, and all its effects illusions too.

How, one might ask, do we make this choice?

But “how” questions are just delusions piled upon a delusion. How can what is not real undo what is not real? A thousand choices seem to appear before us, requiring our judgment and active choice, but in truth, there is only decision and even that one is only a seeming choice. Creation has no opposite; there is nothing to choose between.

Here in the context of separation, our work is to learn how to desire only Heaven. When we want only what God gives us in Creation, then the illusion of choice will be clear to us, and we will be home.

Therefore, ask: what stands between you and oneness, between you and the Christ, between you and creation? What blocks the light? What hinders the flow of Love?

One by one, we raise those fears and insecurities and doubts into the light of understanding and inquiry. If we think we aren’t good enough, if we think we are better than others, if we think we can have both Heaven and Hell . . . all of it. All of it raised up with the Holy Spirit to be evaluated in truth, and kept if it brings us joy, and let go if it brings us anything else.

The conscious choice of Heaven is as sure as is the ending of the fear of hell, when it is raised from its protective shield of unawareness, and is brought to light . . . who can fail to make a choice between alternatives when only one is seen as valuable; the other as a wholly worthless thing, a but imagined source of guilt and pain? (W-pI.183.10:1, 3).

Who, the course asks, hesitates when this is their choice (W-pI.138.10:4)?

And it is just this evaluation we are learning how to make. We are learning how to discern between what is true and what is false, and to value only what is true, and therefore to be no longer troubled by what is false.

We recognize we make a conscous choice between what has existence and what has nothing but an appearance of the truth. Its pseudo-being, brought to what is real, is flimsy and transparent in the light . . . Now it is recognized as but a foolish, trivial mistake (W-pI.138.11:2-3, 5).

Today’s lesson is a reaffirmation of our commitment to learning, and a reawakening of our willingness to question everything, and keep nothing that would obscure in us the Light of truth.

←Lesson 137
Lesson 139→

When I am healed I am not healed alone.

Lesson 137 suggests that sickness is a choice we make that emphasizes the appearance of separate states and interests. It locks us in a body that is unwell, and whose unwellness it a witness unto death. It is the separation embodied.

Therefore, healing must be joining, because it is founded on the law that salvation is mutual and cooperative. We suffer alone but we are saved together. Healing is the decision to join with our brothers and sisters at the level of the mind; it does not take the body into account at all. Thus, healing is accomplished when we see that “the body has no power to attack the universal Oneness of God’s Son” (W-pI.137.3:6).

We can say then that actual healing removes the illusion of separate interests and establishes in our mind the clear understanding that we are one with our brothers and sisters, in Creation, through the Will of our Creator. When this is our truth, then the body’s adventures and misadventures are beside the point. They are no longer real.

Just as forgiveness shines away all sin and the real world will occupy the place of what you made, so healing must replace the fantasies of sickness which you hold before the simple truth. When sickness has been seen to disappear in spite of all the laws that hold it cannot be but real, then . . . the laws can no longer be cherished nor obeyed (W-pI.137.7:1-3).

What does this mean for my cancer? My migraines? My anxiety?

The lesson suggests – in keeping with the overarching themes of A Course in Miracles – that those conditions are not actual problems. Rather, the way in which we see them – as causes of suffering which we alone must endure – is the problem. What A Course in Miracles offers as healing is the Holy Spirit’s quiet confidence that separation is not real and what we are in truth cannot suffer, let alone die.

Healing releases us from the illusion that our minds are contained by – are limited to bodies – and allows us to join with our brothers and sisters outside the constraints of time and space altogether. This is true freedom, and it is not ours alone.

And as you let yourself be healed, you see all those around you, or who cross your mind, or whom you touch or those who seem to have no contact with you, healed along with you . . . legions upon legions will receive the gift that you receive when you are healed (W-pI.137.10:1, 4).

Is it clear? Healing is not about the body. It’s about the mind that believes its limited to a body. That is the sickness ACIM is given to heal. And more than that, this healing is the liberation of other minds which are also deluded about what they are in truth. To be healed is to be an instrument of healing (W-pI.137.11:1). This, too, is a law.

It is this mutuality to which the lesson asks us to give attention, and to understand that in this new vision of healing in relationship, we are brought closer to our Source in Love. When sickness does not keep our attention on the body, that attention naturally turns towards Creation, and creating like unto our Creator. There is nothing else.

What is opposed to God does not exist, and who accepts it not within his mind becomes a haven where the weary can remain to rest. For here is truth bestowed, and here are all illusions brought to truth (W-pI.137.11:3-4).

In a sense, to be open to healing is simply to be willing to know the truth. What are we? Are we bodies that grow sick and die? Are we bodies that go to war with other bodies? Or are we minds – extensions of God’s Mind – given only to Creation in Love?

This is another way of asking: are we ready to remember oneness today? Are we ready to accept that “our function is to let our minds be healed, that we may carry healing to the world, exchanging curse for blessing, pain for joy, and separation for the Peace of God” (W-pI.137.13:1)?

Let us say yes together, and devote our quiet practice time today to allowing our minds to be healed, so that we might remember that the body’s journey is not our journey, and in remembering this, go with all our brothers and sisters home.

←Lesson 136
Lesson 138→

Sickness is a defense against the truth.

Here we are invited to take a close look at what sickness is, and in doing so begin a critical discernment: what is the body and what is the mind? And what am I that I should be able to choose how to see myself?

What am I truth? This is the question A Course in Miracles is given to help us answer.

To be healed is to know oneself in truth. Therefore, the only sickness is the split mind – the mind which is divided against itself, insisting it is limited to a body, and subject to the body’s vulnerability and frailty. All the body’s ills – from a headache to cancer – are merely symptoms of the only problem we actually have: the problem of separation.

Sickness is not an accident . . . its purpose is to hide reality, attack it, change it, render it inept, distort it, twist it or reduce it to a little pile of unassembled parts. The aim of all defenses is to keep the truth from being whole (W-pI.136.2:1, 3-4).

When we remember that we are whole, and remember that we are not bodies, then the body’s sickness is no longer sickness, and all that remains is the body’s usefulness in communication. It becomes a means of communion with our brothers and sisters, and the communion is always a remembrance of wholeness.

More practically, we are asked in this lesson to be open to the truth. We are asked to make a specific space for the truth to be revealed to us in all its fullness. The truth is that you are mind; you are not a body. The truth is that your mind is an extension of God’s mind, not the activity of a single brain.

God knows not of your plans to change His Will . . . You can but choose to think you die, or suffer sickness or distort the truth in any way. What is created is apart from all of this (W-pI.136.11:1, 4-5).

The lesson is an invitation not to understand this conceptually – although that is not a bad thing – but rather to know it, to experience it. If I say the river is cold, you know what I mean, but if you want to know yourself its coldness, then you must enter the river.

Lesson 136 invites us to step into the river – or, more accurately, to consent to have the river enter us.

When we remember that we are minds, then we see instantly the sickness of separation. We understand perfectly at once the problem we face with all our brothers and sisters. By identifying as what we are not, we have forced both body and mind to be what they are not. Mind becomes unaware of its creative power, and the body grows terrified of its very nature.

That is how we live right now: forgetful and fearful. To see this clearly is the beginning of the end of suffering. It is the beginning of remembering what we are and how we are called to create in our Creator’s likeness. And that is the end of fear, because the wholly innocent cannot be fearful. They can only be quietly naturally happy, and happiness is their gift to the world.

Healing will flash across your open mind, as peace and truth arise to take the place of war and vain imaginings. There will be no dark corners sickness can conceal, and keep defended from the light of truth. There will be no dim figures from your dreams, nor their obscure and meaningless pursuits with double puposes insanely sought, remaining in your mind (W-pI.136.16:1-3).

This lesson is not about physical healing. Physical healing is not the miracle A Course in Miracles teaches us. The body does what bodies do. The miracle is to understand we are neither contained in nor limited by the body. It is, for a while, a means of communication with others who believe they are separated from God. This is an insight that we have at the level of the mind. And it is an invitation to lean deeply into that mind, and to realize that it – not the body to which it seems so irrevocably yoked – is what is real.

When we are sick in the world – with a cold, with Covid, with cancer – the problem is not the phhysical sickness. The problem is our identification with the body that appears sick. That is the actual sickness ACIM is given to heal. When we no longer identify with the body, then its apparent sickness is neutral. It is merely an opportunity to share with our brothers and sisters the good news of salvation: we are not bodies!

Perhaps the cold allows us to let somebody else care for us for a day. Or it gives us a day to rest and read at home, deepening our understanding of ACIM metaphysics. Perhaps our cancer allows us to teach nurses and doctors that true healing is always at the level of mind, not the body to which they so carefully and responsibly attend.

The form the healing of separation takes is never the point, because we are not bodies, and nobody else is either. And there is no world! Yet in the context of separation, both appear to exist and be real, and so our work is to learn that this is an illusion and then – by example – to teach others to see it as an illusion as well.

Teaching others is simply a function of our happiness. If we are unaffected by the body’s adventures, if we are content despite its apparent adverse circumstances, then maybe our brothers and sisters can be, too.

Therefore, focus not on the body but on the mind which decides what it is and how to see itself. Let truth dawn in your mind, and let its dawning teach you how to be happy, and how to teach this happiness to all the world. You have no other function. You couldn’t ask for another function. You are here to save the world from the mad idea that it is separate from God and from love.

Indeed, thirty minutes of joyful openness to this truth is a small price to pay for the salvation of all life, no?

←Lesson 135
Lesson 137→

Let me perceive forgiveness as it is.

Forgiveness is the end of illusions, for it sees through them to reality, and thus releases us from bondage and suffering. It is a way of seeing, rather than a response to wrongdoing.

Lesson 134 offers us an interesting correction: when we see a brother or sister as sinful, we simply ask if we would accuse ourselves of the same sin. If we are honest, the answer is no. Why else have we projected it onto a brother or sister?

And as we refuse to burden our brothers and sisters with projection, and as we refuse to accept that burden in our own mind, we begin at last to perceive the truth as God created it. We begin to understand that none of the wrongs and ills in the world are real; we don’t need to solve them or deal with them in any way. We don’t even have to let them go. We can simply look past them to the truth which radiates God’s love (W-pI.134.2:5).

Forgiveness in A Course in Miracles is actually unrelated to wrongdoing of any kind. In bodies in the world, forgiveness is a gift we give another who has harmed us – it reflects our large-heartedness, our patience, our kindness, our Christ-like nature.

But that kind of forgiveness is a lie, because it reinforces the underlying error that sin is real. Therefore, it actually condemns our brother and sister by asserting they have actually done something wrong. And since we cannot lay a burden on another without experiencing it ourself, forgiveness is the world is simply another form of condemnation and lovelessness (W-pI.134.4:2).

There is another way.

It is sin’s unreality that makes forgiveness naturally and wholly sane, a deep relief to those who offer it; a quiet blessing where it is received. It does not countenance illusions, but collects them lightly, with a little laugh, and gently lays them at the feet of truth. And there they disappear entirely (W-pI.134.6:1-3).

Thinking this way – and allowing this thinking to inform our living – becomes our new spiritual practice (W-pI.134.13:1). And it is a practice. This is not how the world sees forgiveness; it is not how ego counsels us to respond to apparent harms and ills. We have to remember, and when we forget, we begin again.

Forgiveness belongs in this complex sequence of lessons addressing the world’s unreality because it is forgiveness that sees past the world entirely, dismissing it as no more than a wisp of smoke to be blown away in a light breeze. Forgiveness is the practice by which our belief in the reality of the world is undone.

This happens by giving attention to the supposedly awful things others have done. Imagine the worst sin and picture the worst sinner and ask: would you accuse yourself of doing this? Your answer releases them from the bondage of projection and it releases you at the same time. Who does not see the world as sinful, sees what instead?

A world in which no longer have to fight imaginary enemies in order to be safe (W-pI.134.12:1-2). A world in which we do not need to wall others in or out, nor practice other forms of defense and attack (W-pI.134.3-4). We walk gently, inviting others to walk with us as we leave behind suffering and pain.

That this is not easy is understood. Simple perhaps, but not easy. That is why it is a practice. Forgiveness as ACIM teaches it is “as alien to the world” as is our own reality (W-pI.134.13:2). We need to be clear about this: we are being asked to look at the world in a way that is foreign, that may even feel dangerous.

This is why we say that A Course in Miracles is a spiritual practice that is rigorous and demanding. Its promise of peace is real, but the change of mind required to undo the blocks to that peace is daunting. Why else would we be here?

←Lesson 133
Lesson 135→

I will not value what is valueless.

Today’s lesson takes the abstract intensity of “there is no world” and seeks to make it practical. It wants to give us a means by which to approach the truth of their is no world here in the world. In a sense, this is a hand-holding lesson, a baby steps lesson. But their impact remains far-reaching.

Understanding and practicing today’s lesson rests on a thorough understanding of ego’s motives and agend and, critically, its dishonesty.

Ego is that aspect of thinking which emphasizes that we are bodies. It uses the association of self and body as the measure of value. It wants us to be “drawn to bodily concerns, to things you buy, to eminence as valued by the world” even though these things bring us only sorrow (W-pI.133.2:2).

The sorrow is the point; the sense of loss is the point. When we are sad and lonely, when we feel unfulfilled, when we are fearful and desperate, we are mostly likely to turn to ego and ask it for help. Ego lives on this attention: it has to keep us unsatisfied because only then will we turn to it.

The way ego does this is keeping us focused on the body in the world.

A Course in Miracles – through its Teacher, the Holy Spirit – offers us an alternative. There are no satisfactions in the world. Period. There is literally nothing there.

Therefore, attention given to it is attention given to illusion which can only lead to confusion and suffering. To what shall we give attention instead?

Lesson 133 offers some practical considerations in answer to that question.

First, if the thing to which we are giving attention, and holding as a solution to a problem – if it has any value for a body in the world – will not last forever, then it has no value (W-pI.133.6:1). If it is subject in any way to time, then it has no value.

What fades and ies was never there, and makes no offering to him who chooses it. He is deceived by nothing in a form he thinks he likes (W-pI.133.6:4-5).

Second, if the thing we believe is valuable – if it can be taken from someone else – then we are denying our brother or sister’s right to have everything. We are acting as if limits are real, and we are not exempt from the power of our own thought. Therefore, if we deny anyone anything, we are denying our own self everything.

Both of these examples make clear that if what we value is subject to the laws of time and space, as they appear to us in these bodies, then they are not real and do not actually have value.

Why then do we value them? Because we are decieved by ego, which cannot tell us the truth about it wants, and thus locks us into a deranged fantasy of life-long suffering that ends in death (W-pI.133.8:7). But understand: we only fall for its lies because we want to fall for them. We want to be deceived.

However, a point comes in our lives when we no longer accept ego’s distortions. We cannot sustain the ego’s illusions any longer because our sorrow is too great and the idea that there is another way too pervasive. At that point, we can ask the fundamental question, the answer to which begins to align our will with God’s: do I feel guilty about this choice?

If you feel any guilt about your choice, you have allowed the ego’s goals to come between the real alternatives. And thus you do not realize there are but two, and the alternative you think you chose seems fearful, and too dangerous to be the nothingness it actually is (W-pI.133.11:2-3).

Remember: the ego’s goals are those that keep you focused on the body in the world. They cannot work. If we believe they can, then we are making the ego’s world real: we are living out the separation from God, for which we can only feel guilty.

“Guilt” here may well be experienced as guilt but it can also be experienced as shame, greed, righteous indignation, judgment of others for not working as hard as we do, self-satisfaction with diet, exercise, spiritual practice, intellectual justifications et cetera.

Guilt is always an argument with God, because it is always the absence of natural sustainable happiness. So another way to evaluate your choice is: does this make you happy in a way that cannot be affected if the choice is undone? Does this choice set up any conflict with a brother or sister? Can anybody lose?

A Course in Miracles argues that choice is easy because we are either choosing love or fear – everybody wins or nobody wins. How hard is the choice when those are the options? Choice in the world is an illusion. Choice at the level of Spirit is easy.

The challenge arises when we don’t see those two choices – we see a veritable smorgasbord of bodies and objects and ideas between which we can choose. Complexity is of the ego, not the Holy Spirit.

Complexity is nothing but a screen of smoke, which hides the very simple fact that no decision can be difficult. What is the gain to you in learning this? It is far more than merely leting you make choices easily and without pain (W-pI.133.12: 3-5).

In fact, learning that there is only one choice is what allows us to let go of the world and the body, and all the senseless choices that seem to go along with them. We give up everything and what remains? Perfect peace and happiness are what remains. “Heaven itself is reached with open hands and open minds, which come with nothing to find everything and claim it as their own” (W-pI.133.13:1).

Thus, this lesson advices us to give careful attention to what we are choosing and why we find it valuable. Are we following the ego’s lead or the Holy Spirit’s? Who is teaching what to value and why?

←Lesson 132
Lesson 134→