Sean Reagan

My mind holds only what I think with God.

In quiet I receive God’s Word today (Lesson 125).
All that I give is given to myself (Lesson 126).

“Quiet” in this context refers to what is going on in our minds, not what is happening externally. You can practice this lesson on a bench in Times Square or a mountain Zendo equally.

It’s true setting up a space in which to pray can be helpful. It’s true waking a little earlier in order to be alone is often helpful. Those conditions can help our as yet-untrained minds settle.

But they are not necessary. They are not required. What is necessary is to give attention to what is happening in our minds. What are we thinking about? What can we not help but think about? What should we think more about and who decided? How do thoughts drive feelings and vice-versa? Isn’t everything we do an effect of thought? Isn’t the world just a thought upon a thought upon a thought?

When we see the tangled skein these questions weave and never quite leave behind via that elusive thought named “answer,” we might get curious if there is anything beyond or outside thought. If thought doesn’t know, what does? We might look into this nonconceptual awareness we hear about. We might discover what Tara Singh called the space between thoughts.

When we do this over and over – this is a very rigorous process until it’s not – we might find a kindness and an intelligence that is not of thought and not of the body either. What is it? Can we be in dialogue with it? Does it know us? How?

The answers to these questions are subsumed by what A Course in Miracles calls “God’s Word.” It doesn’t matter what we call it. What matter is our willingness to listen and to understand. Our willingness is our declaration that there must be another way.

When we make this declaration we do not make it alone. We make it for all our brothers and sisters, from the dust motes to tiger sharks to quasars. And some of them – channeling Helen Schucman unto Bill Thetford – will answer us. They will say: yes, I will help you find this other way. Let’s begin right now.

Does it make sense? You are not sitting quietly alone today – you are sitting with everyone, and everyone is sitting with you. Everything you give is given to yourself and all I can say is thank you. Thank you.

←Lesson 142
Lesson 144→

My mind holds only what I think with God.

I thank my Father for His gifts to me (Lesson 123).
Let me remember I am one with God (Lesson 124).

Tara Singh said that when he worked closely with Helen Schucman at the beginning of his ACIM study and practice, she encouraged him write a daily gratitude journal. For what was he thankful each day? It was at least for a time a staple of his spiritual life.

Gratitude cannot be alien to our practice of A Course in Miracles. It is a means by which our heart and mind are purified of sorrow and confusion, and are thus prepared to give attention to fear, which – regardless of its many forms – is the sole block to our remembrance of Love as our inheritance in Creation.

Thus, today’s summary of Lessons 123 and 124 neatly encapsulates our spiritual awakening: we are thankful for the gift of life through which we can remember that we are one with God, and thus beyond the reach of death and loss. This is happy news!

To know this is to know also that our mind can hold only what we think with God. Everything else is an illusion; everything else is a dream. Our honesty in this regard aligns us with the Truth as God created it, which undoes our mistaken belief in separation as a real event with real effects. Even our mere willingness to be honest undoes the ego’s deception.

Perhaps we begin our morning contemplation with a brief recognition of all that for which we are grateful today, and then offer that thankfulness to our Creator. The One who has blessed us will not fail to bless us now, nor hide from us the truth that blessings are made to reveal. What else could Love do or be?

In gratitude, we remember God, and for this we are more thankful than words can say. In this way, we enter silent communion with all life, lifting in shared praise our hearts to Heaven.

←Lesson 141
Lesson 143→

My mind holds only what I think with God.

Forgiveness is the key to happiness (Lesson 121).
Forgiveness offers everything I want (Lesson 122).

The happiness envisioned by A Course in Miracles is not the happiness of getting what we want and getting rid of what we don’t want. Rather, it is the quiet and sustainable contentment of one who know they cannot be apart from Creation, much less their Creator.

Confident in the knowledge that they are wholly innocent and can only create in the image of their Creator, miracle workers rest easily in imperturbable joy. Their happiness is immune to the comings and goings of the world, and it cannot be contained by – though it can be expressed through – a body.

Forgiveness – which is seeing clearly the innocence of all Creation, and knowing that sin is impossible – is the foundation upon which this natural happiness is built. Forgiveness reflects a mind that does not seek conflict but the end of conflict, and that wants to serve its brothers and sisters, not defeat or neutralize them.

For those still in the thrall of ego, this would be impossible. Therefore, the Holy Spirit becomes our indispensable ally, teaching us how to recognize thoughts which bring happiness and peace, and listening only to them.

This is easy when we remember that our minds in truth are not apart from God’s Mind, and therefore hold only the thoughts that we think with God.

Our learning process then must include contemplative silences in which we listen to the Holy Spirit, and are led by its gentle clarity to the thoughts we think with God in the Mind we share with all life, beyond the constraints of time and space.

Today, we offer that silence and contemplation to our brothers and sisters, that we might remember together the happiness that God promises us through Forgiveness, which is the great expediter of salvation.

←Lesson 140
Lesson 142→

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→