Sean Reagan

If I defend myself I am attacked.

Perhaps nowhere does A Course in Miracles make so clear the power of mind to choose peace over conflict, happiness over sorrow and healing over sickness than it does in this lesson. Any one lesson can awaken us from the dream of separation; this is the clarity of A Course in Miracles for those for whom it is the way.

I receive this lesson as a gift, not a burden. It is a joy, not an obligation. And it is very very hard to understand and practice.

It seems reasonable that when we are attacked we should defend ourself. Yet Lesson 135 upends this logic, reversing the world’s idea of cause and effect: it is only when we defend ourselves that we are attack. Defense precedes attack. How can this be?

Ideas of attack and defense arise in a mind that has chosen to identify itself with a body that is vulnerable in a world that is vicious, cruel and unpredictable. This is an error; we are not bodies (W-pI.199.8:7-8). Therefore, every defense we make reinforce the original mistaken belief, effectively attacking the mind that has forgotten what it is in truth.

Defend the body and you have attacked your mind. For you have seen in it the faults, weaknesses, the limits and the lacks from which you think the body must be saved. You will not see the mind as separate from bodily conditions. And you will impose upon the body all the pain that comes from the conception of the mind as limited and fragile, and apart from other minds and separate from its Source (W-pI.135.9:1-4).

The body is an instrument (W-pI.135.8:2) the mind uses to communicate with other minds (T-6.V.A.5:5), all in service of God’s Plan for Salvation, which is simply remembrance of the peace and justice inherent in oneness (W-pI.135.18:1). In and of itself it is neutral; only the mind establishes its value and its function.

Thus, the question becomes: to whom does the mind turn for guidance?

The suggestion is that when we allow our minds to be still and we stop insisting on their assocation with bodies, that we will remember their abstract nature, and see clearly the futility of minds *being embodied. Communicating through bodies, for a time? Yes. But actually being bodies, subject to the entropy and eventual death of bodies? No.

Lesson 135 challenges us to bring these ideas into application by looking at our habit of planning. “A healed mind does not plan” (W-pI.135.11:1), but you and I plan a *lot. Can we look at this? Can we consider another way?

Plans are always a form of defense, and thus an attack on our integrity as creations of God, who is Love. They represent the ego’s insistence that we are vulnerable and in charge of our own protection. We must build walls, store provisions, forge alliances, declare enemies and forever be on the lookout.

The course suggests that when we plan, we are essentially admitting that we are weak, alone and unsafe. To admit this is to deny God as our creator and to assert that God’s creation can be dangerous and chaotic.

Can you be at peace with such a concept of your home? Yet what endowed the body with the right to serve you thus except your own belief? It is your mind which the body all the functions that you see in it, and set its value far beyond a little pile of dust and water (W-pI.135.6:2-4).

As always, we are doing this to ourself (T-27.VIII.10:1).

If we can see the connection between the mind’s decision to identify as a body and our fearfulness, then we can ask for help in choosing a new identity. This is really another way of saying, we are asking for help in discerning between what is true and what is false.

Defenses are the plans you undertake to make against the truth. Their aim is to select what you approve, and disregard what you consider imcompatible with your beliefs of your reality. Yet what remains is meaningless indeed (W-pI.135.17:1-3).

It is meaningless because reality exists apart from our judgment of it. Our ideas about reality are not reality. Our interpretation of those ideas are not reality either. Therefore, our plans – which are defenses against an unknown future, using the past as a guide – can only hurt us by obscuring, dissembling and crucifying our reality which is incapable of threat (W-pI.135.17:4).

Thus, the invitation is to rest without plans and allow the Plan of God – which is Truth, Reality and Love – to be revealed to us. Indeed, the revelation is of more than just a divine plan – it is our identity as Christ, which is God’s Creation, creating like its Creator.

Without defenses, you become a light which Heaven gratefully acknowledges to be its own. And it will lead you on in ways appointed for yur happiness according to the ancient plan, begun when time was born (W-pI.135.20:1-2).

Let us let go – for five minutes, an hour, a day, a life even – of our plans for our happiness, benefit and abundance. Let us empty ourselves of all our goals and agendas and come empty-handed unto our God who has not forgotten us (W-pI.135.25:1). Let us remember God together today, joining our little lights, so that we might make plain our identity in love.

←Lesson 134
Lesson 136→

God’s Will for me is perfect happiness.

We are confused about what we are, and our confusion causes us pain. We project onto others the cause of our pain, as they project theirs onto us. Altogether, it makes for a sad and difficult existence.

A Course in Miracles promises us there is another way.

God’s Will for you is perfect happiness because there is no sin, and suffering is causeless. Joy is just, and pain but the sign you have misunderstood yourself. Fear not the Will of God (W-pI.101.6:1-3).

We fear God because we believe in sin and, as an extension of that belief, that sin deserves punishment. Therefore, God is both the Creator of sin and the Punisher of sinners. Who wouldn’t fear that God? Who wouldn’t feel doomed?

A Course in Miracles teaches us that we are in error in this belief, and that it can be undone by giving attention to it. God’s Will for is happiness because we were created happily as happiness. Salvation is but the remembrance of this truth.

Accept Atonement with an open mind, which cherishes no lingering belief that you have made a devil of God’s Child. There is no sin (W-pI.101.5:3-4).

It is on this basis that we can see the logic – and accept as fact – that God’s Will for us is perfect happiness and that suffering of any kind has no cause and therefore is not real (W-pI.101.6:1).

And it is in this simple recognition that our liberation from suffering in all its forms is assured.

Today escape from madness. You are set on freedom’s road, and now today’s idea brings wings to speed you on, and hope to go still faster to the waiting goal of peace. There is no sin (W-pI.101.7:2-4).

If we can turn to this idea on a regular basis, and approach it with the willingness to see it as true, then our thinking will shift. The insanity of believing in sin will fade, replaced by the quiet confidence that we are blessed and bless in turn.

A Course in Miracles teaches us that our greatest fear is an illusion, altogether without effect. Salvation – the perfect restoration of Self to God in Creation – is given to us as soon as we accept this.

←Lesson 100
Lesson 102→

Light and joy and peace abide in me (lesson 93).

I am as God created me (lesson 94).

Miracles are brought forth in a light which is inherent in us. It is the light of understanding and humility, the light of remembering that we are only here to be helpful to our brothers and sisters.

Thus, in a real sense, we are the site – the home – in which miracles are both perceived and experienced. We are the home to which our brothers and sisters come in order to remember the happiness in which their own innocence is revealed. –

This light and joy and peace are the glorious condition of what we are in creation, because it is the condition of creation itself. We cannot undo or modify in any way this clear and simple truth. We can deny it – we can keep our attention away from it a long time, lifetimes even – but we cannot end it.

Why is this so? Why is the truth so impervious to fear?

The answer is: because we remain as God created us. Our perfection is eternal because it reflects the perfection of God, and it is shared equally with every single facet of creation.

Even to say that we are “one” with God is to miss the point, because it suggests there is an “other” in need of union. It allows for the impossibility that what is perfect and whole can be fragmented and chaotic. In truth, we have not left God; in truth we cannot leave God, because we share one Will and that Will does not contemplate separation.

To believe otherwise is to fall for the lie that a dream can be real. And yet even within that dream we are given a Teacher who can teach us that we merely dream, and that our long sufferance is merely an illusion.

This review lesson is in the nature of an affirmation. Both of the primary lessons it covers – in particular Lesson 94 – are essential to both our understanding of A Course in Miracles and our application of its thought system. Both merit our attention in a serious way, at evening and morning, but throughout the day as well.

Peace is a condition of what we are in truth. Within that peace are joy and love, themselves the fruits of the radical inclusivity that defines God’s creation.

However, if remembering that peace – and making it the singular fact of our day-to-day existence – were simple, then we would not need A Course in Miracles. Jesus has been with us in some form or other for over two thousand years and look how it’s gone. We need help – a lot of it. And we need it because our perception of separation is deeply ingrained in us. Our thought patterns are not only twisted but they resist and push back against that which would untangle them.

Thus, we come to this review period with the potential to further restore to our unhealed minds a dim memory of our original wholeness. We are recollect and remember Heaven in a very literal way today. Thread by thread we are restoring our minds to wholeness, releasing the many veils that keep us from remembering Christ and, through that memory, God.

So we apply ourselves, then. We make it the goal of this day: to make it holy by remembering that we do indeed remain as God created us, and that the memory of this truth is seen in the very light that we are, being created by God in whose essence that light is shared.

←Lesson 111
Lesson 113→

God, being Love, is also happiness.

Yesterday I asked if it made sense that love would bring forth anything other than happiness? I suggested that any logical inquiry would affirm that yes, love begets happiness.

Today’s lesson both confirms this truth, and extends is unto God, who is not apart from love.

Happiness is an attribute of love. It cannot be apart from it. Nor can it be experienced where love is not. Love has not limits, being everywhere. And therefore joy is everywhere as well (W-pI.103.1:1-5).

We might ask: okay, what’s the problem then?

The problem is that mind – being free to choose – can choose to not believe this, and instead make a world of fear, guilt, hate and violence and pretend that is its home and reality.

When mind does that, it effectively redefines love as both limited and capable of being opposed (W-pI.103.1:7). It ceases to reflect perfect safety and happiness, and instead reflects a situation in which attack and defense are reasonable.

Thus, our self-made love – and the world and selves subject to it – fail to achieve the liberation which is the function of our ACIM practice. God becomes a punisher, a capricious and unpredictable ruler, and we are sinners standing in dreadful opposition to Heaven.

If that or anything like it is our underlying thought system, then we are going to be unhappy indeed.

The current sequence of ACIM lessons aims to undo this strange belief, replacing it with the clear and helpful idea that God, being Love, is also happiness (W-pI.103.3:5).

If we are faithful to our practice, then we will experience a change in thought. Being will lighten.

. . . welcome all the happiness it brings as truth replaces fear, and joy becomes what you expect to take the place of pain. God, being, Love, it will be given you (W-pI.103.3:2-3).

If nothing else, we can rest in the assurance that there is another way, and we are now walking it. We can stop, go a step or two backwards, or merely take half-hearted baby steps. It doesn’t matter. We have made the choice to remember what we are in truth, and our choice becomes the light by which the memory dawns in our mind as reality.

What we are is love, and so happiness is our natural state, and in this understanding we realize our unconditional oneness with God.

←Lesson 102
Lesson 104→

Miracles are seen in light (lesson 91).

Miracles are seen in light, and light and strength are one (lesson 92).

Miracles are seen in light, a phenomenon which reflects God’s strength, which was given to us in creation without condition. While miracles may have observable external effects, they are mostly shifts in thinking from what we might loosely call egoic patterns to spiritual patterns. Or from fear to love.

When we are miracle-minded, we are thinking the way God thinks and – however briefly and tenuosly – are enlightened and awakened.

Miracles makes us happy. And, by making us happy, they naturally support further expressions and experiences of miracle-mindedness.

Thinking with God becomes our practice, and in this way light enters our living and gives us strength to face the fear that obstructs love.

It is an error to deny the world and our experience in it (e.g., T-2.IV.3:10-11). It’s better to simply be as honest about that experience as we can be. Where is it challenging? Where is it full of flow and ease? Where are we putting up resistance? What do we not want to look at?

A Course in Miracles is not trying to drive us to renunciation and asceticism. It is not a spiritual practice that doubles down on suffering and repentance. It is playful and sincere and fundamentally helpful.

Truly, the course aims to direct our attention to the source of conflict: and thus, the only location where change is possible: the mind. That is the essence of this review lesson. It asks us to turn within to our perception of weakness and strife, to understand this as a form of darkness that comes from attempting to live apart from God and our brothers and sisters, and to choose another way.

We are invited to avail ourselves of the healing light of God’s strength. We are asked to consider, in other words, bringing the separation to a close in one radiant embrace of God and love.

What else would we ask for? What else could make us happy?

Of course, it is unlikely that we are going to do this. It takes training, which comes from giving attention to the Holy Spirit’s still quiet voice, which in turn supports our willingness to be healed unconditionally, rather than insist on healing on personal terms (which are always set and defended by ego).

Thus, the introduction to this review period reminds us:

Do not forget how little you have learned.
Do not forget how much you can learn now.
Do not forget your Father’s need of you,
As you review these thoughts He gave to you (w-pI.rIII.in.13:1-3).

God’s strength is our strength: the truth of this is unaffected by either our denial of it or our projection. We cannot will away the Will that we share with God in Creation. We can delay the remembrance, yes, but the truth of it is beyond error.

So, in a sense, this lesson – neatly correlating with the theme of the review period – is a gentle reminder that we need not wait on time to know in a real and tangible way the peace of Christ which surpasses understanding.

←Lesson 110
Lesson 112→

I am as God created me.

The successive nature of the lessons – each one expanding, sometimes obviously, sometimes subtly, on the previous – so that the whole workbook evolves or extends in the manner of a snowflake, a dynamic pattern beautifully extending itself, is one of the most beautiful and pleasing aspects of A Course in Miracles.

Thus, this lesson – with its gentle assertion that we are as God created us – is really the reason why the previous lesson is logically consistent and thus reliable. We can rest in God because we are natural extensions of God.

If you are remain as God created you, appearances cannot replace the truth, health cannot turn to sickness, nor can death be substituted for live, or fear for love. All this has not occurred, if you remain as God created you (W-pI.110.3:1-2).

The world of suffering and fear – in which pain comes and goes, sometimes replaced by pleasure, sometimes merely by a bland neutrality that is neither joful nor joyless – is an effect of believing we are other than as God created us. It reflects the belief that our existence is up to us. But if we remain in Creation as God wills, then the world constructed by our will is simply an error which can be easily corrected. Lesson 110 is the correction.

In this way – symphonically, cumulatively – the lessons together naturally loosen the bonds of ego and deepen our capacity to make contact with “the Self Who is the holy Son of God Himself” (W-pI.110.7:1).

Two aspects of this lesson bear special notice. The first is the pointed observation in the second sentence of the first paragraph that this one lesson would save both us and the world if we only believe it. Implicit in that comment is the fact that we do not believe it but can. It is a challenge to us because it is a reminder that salvation need not be a future event but a present recollection. Our suffering can end now, if we will only give up the crazy idea that our will is separate from God’s.

Thus, it is helpful to face that fact of unbelief where it is within us. Indeed, the whole illusion of separation – the vast network of projection alienating us from love – is premised on this unbelief. When we do not resist the truth that we are unbelievers, then the Holy Spirit is able to gently enter our dream of separation and begin to heal it by reminding us that separation is not so. Awareness of the problem is always precedent to its solution (W-pI.79.1:1).

The other aspect of this lesson that stands out is its quiet confidence that the undoing of our seeming separation is neither unduly complicated nor mysterious. It is simple in nature and so the solution is as well. The whole truth of A Course in Miracles can be found in the idea that God created us and nothing has ever intervened to change or undo that fact. Thus, we are assured that we “need no thought but just this one, to let redemption come to light the world and free it from the past” (W-pI.110.3:3).

The healing power of today’s idea is limitless. It is the birthplace of all miracles, the great restorer of the truth to the awareness of the world (W-pI.110.5:1-2).

And so we can seek in confidence the interior Christ who is savior unto the world and our self because we are not seeking an elusive trickster who delights in confounding and frustrating us, but rather our true Self whose Word is the liberation of the world (W-pI.110.8:1). We want to be found; we want to be saved.

It is helpful to approach these lessons with the humility and willingness of a student who unconditionally trusts their teacher. When we do that, our progress away from dreams of fear and toward informed and creative wakefulness is assured. At any moment we might recall – in a deep and foundational way – that we are the Christ we seek. And if not today, then tomorrow or the day after. There is nothing else to find.

That is the power of the workbook – its ability, through a guide who is within us but not of us – to reliably bring into  application the abstract glory of the text. For we are as God created us – a truth in no way conditioned upon our belief –  and so abide forever in divine peace and eternity.

←Lesson 109
Lesson 111→