Sean Reagan

I loose the world from all I thought it was.

A Course in Miracles invites us to investigate not the world – which is an effect of our thoughts – but rather the source of thought, in order that we might realize that salvation is as easy as changing our mind (W-pI.132.2:1).

You free the past from what you thought before. You free the future from all ancient thoughts of seeking what you do not want to find (W-pI.132.2:3-4).

The world itself is neutral; it is how we see it that gives it meaning and determines its function. Its value lies in the decision we make to see it as either cause or effect. In separation, we mistake the world as the cause of our beliefs and their effects, those we deem good and those we deem bad.

In salvation, we remember that there is no world apart from what we wish (W-pI.132.5:1). Indeed, remembering this is salvation because it restores to our mind its power of decision and reminds it that projection is an illusion. When we cast “out” what we fear to see within, what we fear remains with us because “ideas leave not their source” (W-pI.132:5:3).

This is one of the foundation of healing in ACIM: an idea can be shared but it does not leave its source. It cannot be disowned or severed. If there is one glass of water and I give it to you, then there is no more pie. But if I share with you the location of the spring, then we both know the location. I have not forgotten it. And when you share it with someone else, it remains with you as well.

The world is not real, and thus our sense of being at risk in it, suffering its assaults and indignities, grieving its many losses, enduring endless sacrifice is also not real.

Healing is the gift of those who are prepared to learn there is no world, and can accept the lesson now. Their readiness will bring the lesson to them in some form which they can understand and recognize (W-pI.132.7:1-2).

Note that the course does not insist that the form the lesson takes is uniform. Instead, it recognizes that the form of the lesson will vary from student to student. The world is not real, but the way in which you learn this will not be the same as it was for me, and vice-versa.

A Course in Miracles teaches the lesson by reminding us that we remain as God created us and thus exist beyond the reach of suffering that the world – i.e., time and space – would impose on us. We are not bodies and there is no world. To know this is to be saved, and to know it is to will to remember it.

To free the world from every kid of pain is but to change your mind about yourself. There is no world apart from your ideas because ideas leave not their source, and you maintain the world within your mind in thought (W-pI.132.2-3).

And to change our mind about what we are – to solve our spiritual identity crisis – is simply to remember that we are always God’s Creation, incapable of change or harm. To remember this is to create like our creator, extending only love and freedom. This is what it means to “loose the world” – we stop insisting on seeing it from the perspective of ego, and adopt instead the Holy Spirit’s frame of God’s “timelessness and Love” (W-pI.132.11:1).

Deny illusions, but accept the truth. Deny you are a shadow briefly laid upon a dying world. Release your mind and you will look upon a world released (W-pI.132.13:4-6).

Our healing is not ours alone. This lesson emphasizes that we are healed by our brothers and sisters as they remember who they are in truth, and as we remember as well, we heal them. Together we “bless the world” because we “could never be released alone” (W-pI.132.16:1, 2).

We go together in healing because healing is going together. This sequence of lessons presents a critical and often deeply-challenging concept (there is no world, which is closely linked to “ideas leave not their source). Let us look at these ideas gently, with an open mind, and be grateful for those whose practice and study buttresses our own and makes our shared healing possible.

←Lesson 131
Lesson 133→

No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth.

The confidence inherent in today’s lesson rests upon a subtle fact: what we seek is up to us. If we seek peace where peace is not, then we cannot find peace. It’s like going to the desert and wondering where the ocean is.

To bodies, other bodies and the world will always be real. To ego, its thoughts and beliefs will always be the only option. We cannot search for the end of conflict in what is inherently conflict.

Goals that are meaningless are not attained. There is no way to reach them, for the means by which you strive for them are as meaningless as they are. Who can use such senseless means, and hope through them to gain in anything (W-pI.131.2:1-3)?

Bodies grow old and die. Therefore, the body cannot know eternal life. Egoic thought divides and judges and tries always to control. Therefore, there is no peace but only conflict in it. This is why ego exists. It is why the world was made – to obscure truth and keep us from remembering God.

If we want peace – if we want to remember Heaven, which is the unity of Creator and Creation – then it will have to come from something other than what we are and what the world is. Hence the importance of the little prayer that precedes our practice today:

I ask to see a different world, and think a different kind of thought from those I made. The world I seek I did not make, the thoughts I want to think are not my own (W-pI.131.11:3-4).

We are turning away from the familiar today. We are letting go rather than remaking or reconstructing. We are becoming empty, in order that God’s peace might reveal itself to us as it is – not as we would have it. We are opening to the possibility that our lives – even at their apparently holiest and most purely-intentioned – impose “an alien will upon God’s single purpose” (W-pI.131.8:5).

There is another way and in order to remember it, we have to let go of our insistence that we can find it in the world via our own thinking and effort.

What happens when you let go? You might notice that the one “letting go” cannot be let go of. There is always some sense of self deciding to “let go.” And that sense of self cannot itself be released. This is a paradox – a problem that cannot be solved, dissolved or resolved. It has vexed human beings for centuries.

A Course in Miracles teaches us that it’s a distracting sideshow, and thus wholly unworthy of our attention.

Today we will not choose a paradox in place of truth. How could the Son of God make time to take away the Will of God? He thus denies himself, and contracts what has no opposite (W-pI.131.9:1-2).

We become still today. We refuse to indulge the ego’s attempts to judge the course and judge our practice and dictate the outcome. This is a radical experiment! Truth is given to us, but we have clouded it and the cloud is the world, which includes our bodies, and the dense tangle of self-imposed, self-centered thinking.

Imaginge you are flailing in violent seas. You are struggling to stay afloat, fighting to survive. And Jesus comes and says, “stop fighting. Let go. Go down.” It would sound insane, right? You would say, “yeah, thanks but no thanks, pal.”

Yet that is exactly what we are asked to do today: to stop struggling and become still and find out what is beneath the world and the thoughts that make it. It sounds abstract, idealistic, naive, impossible . . .

Okay! But still. Just try.

Angels light the way, so that all darkness vanishes, and you are standing in a light so bright and clear that you can understand all things you see . . . you realize the world you see before you in the light reflects the truth you knew, and did not quite forget in wandering away in dreams (W-pI.131.13:2-3).

Therefore, let us seek only this understanding. Let us have a goal only this peace. When we hold this single goal, our will naturally aligns with the will of creation, and we naturally remember the fullness of God’s “ancient promise to his holy Son” (W-pI.131.14:4).

When that is our goal, we cannot fail, for we are merely seeking what is real, and what is real is all that can be found, because it is all there is. Today – together and with all our brothers and sisters – let us make it so.

←Lesson 130
Lesson 132→

It is impossible to see two worlds.

A Course in Miracles is simple because it offers us only two choices: reality or unreality, love or fear, innocence or guilt. It is hard – sometimes brutally so – because choosing the reality of our innocence manifest in our inheritance of love means the end of suffering.

And we are very very interested in – very very committed to – suffering. We like to be victims, especially innocent victims. We like the world to be cruel, indifferent and unfair. If it were easy to choose peace, we would have done so a long time ago. We would not need A Course in Miracles, nor any other help.

Today’s lesson helps us see more clearly the totality of the choice we make with respect to the world we see. We can only see one world, and when we see it, the other is disappeared entirely. There is no such thing as a little bit of reality, or a little bit of fear. It is all or nothing.

As a simple example, you could look around you right now and notice the space you are in. I am in the hayloft/office writing and reading. While I am here doing this, I am not throwing a frisbee at the beach with my kids. I am not drinking tea with Chrisoula in the kitchen.

Just as our body can only be in one place at one time, our mind can only choose to see one world – the world made by fear and ego or the world interpreted by love and the Holy Spirit. The one I choose renders the other invisible.

You and I do not want to suffer anymore. Nor do we want the world to suffer. Our desire for the end of suffering is still weak, but it cannot be denied. Our goal, then, is to strengthen our willingness to accept Christ’s Vision, in which we perceive only what is shared and thus serves the function of “loving in a loveless place” (T-14.IV.4:10).

In doing this, we actively refuse to see the ego’s world of differences, competition, sacrifice and loss. Critically, in doing this, we learn that we are not actually choosing between reality and unreality because what is not real does not exist.

Fear has made everything you think you see. All separation, all distinctions, and the multitude of differences you believe make up the world. They are not there. Love’s enemy has made them up. Yet love can have no enemy, and so they have no cause, no being and no consequence (W-pI.130.4:1-5).

We are liberated when we realize there is nothing to choose between; there is only the Love of God endlessly creating, and taking joy in what is created.

The power of mind is such that it can make the impossible appear very real. Indeed, lifetimes can pass in dreams of suffering and pain. When we choose suffering, the world we see produces suffering. The external world always reflects our thinking (W-pI.130.1:2) and our thinking always reflects “our choice of what we want to see” (W-pI.130.1:3).

Accepting this, our work today involves regular attempts to see not the illusion of a world constructed of fear and suffering but rather a world lit up with God’s grace, which is the Vision of Christ.

You will not doubt what you look upon, for though it is perception, it is not the kind of seeing that your eyes alone have ever seen before. And you will know God’s strength upheld you as made this choice (W-pI.130.9:4-5).

Our faithfulness to the daily lesson matters more than what we think of it. It seems too fantastic or supernatural, it violates common sense, it’s too hard or too abstract. The decision to practice reflects the underlying decision to refuse illusion in favor of truth. At that level, we cannot make a mistake.

Without expectation, without a lot of drama, simply understand that a mind which chooses fear cannot simultaneously choose love and then choose love. If you cannot do this, don’t worry about it. The fact that you tried means that you are ready to succeed. Dreams of pain cannot long survive in a mind which does not want them. We are nearer than we know to unending peace and joy.

←Lesson 129
Lesson 131→

Beyond this world there is a world I want.

Lesson 129 saves us from the nihilism that can arise from rejecting the world. It makes clear that our learning process does not involve just the negative, but also a positive. This world holds nothing we want; but there is a world beyond it that we do want.

You cannot stop with the idea the world is worthless, for unless you see that there is something else to hope for, you will only be depressed. Our emphasis is not on giving up the world, but on exchanging it for what is far more satisfying, filled with joy, and capable of offering you peace (W-pI.129.1:2-3).

Exhange is the critical idea here. We are not giving up something of little value for nothing; rather, we are exchanging something of literally no value for that which is beyond value. The Holy Spirit facilitates this transaction, which is effectively with God. We are trading fear for love. We are giving up meaninglessness for actual knowledge.

Communication, unambiguous and plain as day, remains unlimited for all eternity. And God Himself speaks to His Son, as His Son speaks to Him . . . Their knowledge is direct and wholly shared and wholly one (W-pI.129.4:1-2, 4).

So Lesson 129 is not about a transaction in the literal sense – like trading a winter coat that does not fit for one that does. Rather, it is about remembering – by placing no conditions on – that God speaks to us constantly, Whose Voice is our voice, speaking a message of love that we created.

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 llusions interposed between the wholly indivisible and true (W-pI.125.9:3-4).

What do we want? Do we want to hear only God’s Voice or do we want the trinkets and conflicts and sorrows of the world? For what we want we will get. The choice is wholly our own. And if we are honest, are the grounds for our choosing not perfectly clear?

What loss can be for you in choosing not to value nothingness? This world holds nothing that you really want, but what you choose instead you want indeed . . . It waits but for your choosing it, to take the place of all the things you seek but do not want (W-pI.129.6:2-3, 5).

So for today, we close our eyes and seek not what the world offers, but that which rests beyond the world. We are not given today to the body’s concerns – to the ups and down of the world. We raise our spiritual sight beyond appearances to see “lights that are not of this world light one by one, until where one begins another ends loses all meaning as they blend into one’ (W-pI.129.7:5).

This is symbolic language – because words cannot describe our communication with God (e.g., W-pI.129.4:3). Yet what it describes is what experience when we seek the world that appears beyond this one. Our eyes and their function are set aside; our minds fill with joyful understanding.

We give up the world and we lose nothing and gain everything.

←Lesson 128
Lesson 130→

The world I see holds nothing that I want.

Today’s lesson is not a statement about the world. Rather, it is a statement about what we are in truth. It is an invitation to remember our true self, and in doing so, to let go of the small self whose investment is not in truth but in the deceptive fictions of the world made by the ego.

This is a decision that we make. It is an active choice from which effects naturally follow. Reality wants to be seen, but we have to want to see it.

Each thing you value here is but a chain that binds you to the world, and it will serve no other end but this. For everything must serve the purpose you have given it, until you see a different purpose there (W-pI.128.2:1-2).

So, perhaps I value my home – its gardens and little orchards, its quiet spaces for meditation, its lovely view to the east, et cetera. Most people won’t begrudge me this; most people say “nice place you’ve got there.” But A Course in Miracles suggests that the value I set on this place is effectively a “bar across the door that leads to true awareness of your Self” (W-pI.128.3:3).

In part, this is because the things of this world are temporary. They change and shift. They bear many meanings and values, some of which conflict. They can be stolen or destroyed. In truth, the things of the world attest to nothing permanent or real but rather to what is impermanent. They are not a rock on which to remember our Creator and Creation but rather the shifting sands in which ego’s empty promises seem useful and thus function to hide our Creator and Creation.

But also, more problematic, these external objects – be they houses or lovers or landscapes or family heirlooms – by virtue of their impermanence, are symbols of the body’s impermanence. They teach us that since the body too is shift and impermanent, capable of bearing conflicting meanings and values, it too is an unworthy home of truth. And this we cannot bear, for it flies right in the face of ego’s assertion that the body is our only home, which we believe and to which belief we cling.

Yet even this can be undone.

The ego regards the body as its home, and tries to satisfy itself through the body. But the idea that this is possible is a decision of the mind, which has become completely confused about what is really possible (T-4.II.7:8-9).

Lesson 128 is an opportunity to shift our focus – away from the world and, by extension, from the body – in order to remember what we are in truth. This shift in focus is a decision, which means that it is an active step we take. We become still and quiet and resolve to withdraw all our investment in the world – its objects, its ideas, its patterns, its messages and then see what happens.

. . . release your mind from chains and let it seek the level where it finds itself at home. It will be grateful to be free a while. It knows where it belongs. But free its wings and it will fly in sureness and in joy to join its holy purpose (W-pI.128.6:1-4).

This freedom – this experience of freedom – does not occur at the level of the body, but at the level of the mind. It is critical for us to discern between the two. We are not trying to make the world a better place today, nor find for our embodied self a better fit in it. We are seeking the abstract creative perfection of mind and resting there. We are choosing this. We are declaring that this is what we really want. And God, who is reality, responds accordingly.

The suggestion is that when we do this, even briefly, we will not return to the world unchanged. Our perspective on the external world of appearances will have shifted (W-pI.128.7:3), because we will better understand that it is our construction. We are doing this to ourselves (T-27.VIII.10:1). And we can choose another – a happier and more peaceful – way.

←Lesson 127
Lesson 129→

There is no love but God’s.

Slightly more a than a third of the way through the ACIM workbook, we reach a lesson that declares itself “the largest single step this course requests in your advance towards its established goal” (W-pI.127.6:5)

This step has to do with recognizing the full breadth and meaning of “there is no love but God’s” (W-pI.127.3:5).

Love is a law without an opposite. Its wholeness is the power holding everything as one, the link between the Father and the Son which holds them both forever the same (W-pI.127.4:7-8).

Love does not recognize differences (W-pI.127.1:4), and it does not change (W-pI.127.2:1). It cannot be given to one person and withheld from another (W-pI.127.2:4). Love does not judge (W-pI.127.3:1). Wherever it appears, it appears perfect and complete, never once adapting itself to circumstances (W-pI.127.1:5).

Thus, love does not obey the laws of the world. Indeed, the world – and the laws by which it appears to operate – exist to obscure love, to “hide love’s meaning, and to keep it dark and secret” (W-pI.127.5:2).

Lesson 127 is an invitation to go beyond the limits established by perception, to free our mind from “all the laws you think you must obey; of all the limits under which you live, and all the changes that you think are part of human destiny” (W-pI.127.6:4).

Here, the course gently shows us a way out of suffering that is not temporary and not conditional. It points to a love that does not come and go and is therefore not subject to perception. Our eyes do not see it; our hands cannot feel it; our thoughts cannot think it.

How, then, do we know this love?

Call to your Father, certain that His Voice will answer. He Himself has promised this. And He Himself will place a spark of truth within your mind . . . He will shine through your idle thoughts today, and help you understand the truth of love (W-pI.127.9:1-4).

Is it clear? We call. That is what we do. We ask God to remind us that He abides with us forever, and that’s the end of our role. We ask and then we wait, confident that our cry will be answered.

Come to this lesson then in radical trust. Tell yourself that no matter what the course has been like so far – the progress you’ve made, the confusion you’ve felt, the ground you’ve lost – that today you will reach all the way to God. Today you will hear God’s Voice reminding you that you are not separate, not from God and not from your brothers and sisters.

←Lesson 126
Lesson 128→