Reading A Course in Miracles: Special Principles of Miracle Workers

We might consider this section a sort of adjunct to the Principles of Miracles. Yet the focus has shifted somewhat: from what miracles are to what miracle workers do. In a sense, this section is an early exposition about application. Miracles are shifts in thinking that facilitate love rather than fear; here is how we live in order to bring them forth consistently.

Thus, the focus is on deepening – on expanding – our conceptual understanding of both miracles and how to work miracles.

From time to time, students wonder if the “Jesus” who narrates A Course in Miracles is literally the historical Jesus – the follower of John, the itinerant sage of lower Galilee, executed in Jerusalem, whose life, death and resurrection are the structure of Christianity.

Set aside for a moment your answer to that question. Set aside whether having an answer to that question even matters. This section enunciating the special principles of miracle workers, is one of the most fascinating combinations of the historical Jesus and the ACIM Jesus. And it does so through the image of the cross and the idea of crucifixion.

In the text, Jesus clarifies what he meant by asking God to forgive the Roman soldiers who were executing them (as recounted in Luke 23:34).

The statement “Father forgive them for they know not what they do” in no way evaluates what they do. It is an appeal to God to heal their minds. There is no reference to the outcome of the error. That does not matter (T-2.VI.A.16:3-6).

A traditional reading of Jesus’s statement is that the soldiers are behaving in a cruel and unjust way which violates the humanity they share with Jesus. What does one do when another misbehaves? They forgive them and/or ask God to forgive them.

In a sense, Jesus is being the “better” or “bigger” man.

But in the understanding of A Course in Miracles, Jesus suggests the soldiers need forgiveness not for what they do but what what they think. Their minds are unhealed because they believe in an external world in which what they do to another person is not also done to their own selves. What they are doing – crucifying Jesus – isn’t really the point. The specific action one does under the influence of wrong-mindedness is never the problem. Rather, it’s the wrong-mindedness itself, the confusion about what is real.

Thus – again, while elaborating for ACIM students what it means to work miracles – the narrator of the text overlooks what is arguably the most significant historical events in human history. The soldiers could be teasing him for wearing cheap sandals for all he cares. The issue is entirely a question of right vs. wrong-mindedness.

Two things are happening here. First, we are being introduced to the radical and unfamiliar concept of forgiveness in A Course in Miracles. Forgiveness isn’t about judgment with respect to the external world at all; it’s about the mind with which we choose to see that world.

Second, in being asked to revise our understanding of crucifixion, we are being instructed that forgiveness without correction is “an empty gesture” (T-2.VI.A.15:3). Thus, a special principle that miracle workers embody and practice is that forgiveness is “not about judgment at all” (T-2.VI.A.16:2). It is about the injunction to “be of one mind” (T-2.VI.A.17:1).

Thus, this section makes perfectly how utterly radical the conversion of the miracle worker must be. If Jesus could be of one mind with those who tortured and killed him, then who can we possible exclude from our own living and loving?

That is, if the external event we know as the crucifixion – the hideous suffering and death of Jesus on a cross – cannot impede love, then what does? What external event or individual can we possible place us in a posture of refusing to love?

Indeed, the miracle worker is literally called to cooperate with Jesus – by remembering him in this specific way – in bringing forth love (T-2.VI.A.17:2).

And, again, to “bring forth love” is simply to be of one mind with the other, which the course refers to as “right-mindedness.” Hence this critical directive with respect to our own behavior.

Never confuse right- and wrong-mindedness. Responding to any form of error with anything except a desire to heal is an expression of this confusion (T-2.VI.A.13:3-4).

And a few lines later:

Forgiveness is an empty gesture unless it entails correction. Without this it is essential judgmental, rather than healing (T-2.VI.A.15:3-4).

Thus, miracle workers – which is what we are by virtue of our study of A Course in Miracles – eschew judgment altogether in favor of the right-mindedness modeled by Jesus as he met his death. It was not his death he wanted to fix, nor the behavior of the soldiers killing him. Rather, he wanted to heal their minds from the confusion that the external world has either meaning or effect.

In other words, healing takes place at the level of mind, which is created through God, and has literally no effect on the world it makes by believing in the possibility of separation from God.

The miracle abolishes the need for lower-order concerns . . . A clear distinction between what is created and what is made is essential. All forms of healing rest on this fundamental correction in level perception (T-2.VI.A.11:1, 12:1-2).

I want to touch briefly on the crucifixion and how we think about it with other folks in our living, especially those who aren’t studying A Course in Miracles.

I have friends, family members and colleagues who are Christian. They reflect a broad spectrum of Christian belief and experience. I don’t believe any of them would willingly entertain a conception of the crucifixion that sets aside the historical event in order to emphasize healing at the level of mind. For them, in varying ways, the cross is how Jesus redeems us all. It is the very essence of Christian identity. There are plenty of variations on this theme, but most Christians would argue that setting aside the cross as a “last useless journey” (T-4.in.3:1) is silly at best and heretical at worst.

So why does A Course in Miracles want to undo this idea? Why does it so utterly upend this traditional image?

I think it goes very forcefully to the general ACIM concept that form does not matter, but content does. It is not what we perceive but rather the mind with which we perceive it that counts. Love does not reside in objects or as an object in the world; it resides at the level of mind.

On this view, Jesus’s trial, torture and crucifixion are simply a vivid and widely-shared example of the guilt and fear that we experience as a consequence of believing that we are actually separated from God. Giving meaning to that event – he redeemed our sins, his blood was shed because he loved us, God loves us so much he killed his only son – is simply another doomed attempt to justify the separation, to see it in a meaningful light.

But the solution is not to translate separation but forget about it altogether. It did not happen. Only in that sense can we fully appreciate what the course means when it states that the cross can be our “last useless journey.”

I suggest – carefully and respectfully – that in this section, miracle workers are being invited to move beyond an experience that is merely religious or theological or even spiritual. We are not making new belief systems to replace old ones; we are not building churches or monasteries. A Course in Miracles is a radical self-study program, one that aims to change us – you and me – as we find ourselves right at this very moment. We are invited to remember ourselves in and as the love that we sometimes call God and for which Jesus remains a helpful symbol.

Symbol – but not idol. Indeed, throughout these special principles that guide the activity of miracle workers, one can almost hear Jesus begging that we not make of him a distant idol, forever enshrined on an instrument of torture. Rather, he wants to be accepted and welcomed as an older brother who knows the way home and is here to share it with us by walking with us.

Turning from this section, then, can leave miracle workers with a deeper appreciation for the entirely radical path we are now walk: miracle workers literally work miracles, transforming their minds from sites of hatred, guilt and fear to a radiant love becoming of those for whom Jesus is liberated and given welcome.

There is nothing else that needs to be done. Indeed, there is nothing else that can be done. And we have at last found the form of the one – if we will let him lead us, let him teach us – that will accomplish the seemingly impossible with us.

A Course in Miracles Lesson 14

God did not create a meaningless world.

We are scared because we believe in a world that does not exist. Reality is hidden from us because we insist that we – and not God – know what meaning is and where it is to be found.

Lesson 14 is the calm reminder that the meaningless world made by the ego and insisted upon by the ego is merely a bad dream. It does not exist, because God does not create that way, and only what God creates exists.

The world you see has nothing to do with reality. It is of your own making, and it does not exist (W-pI.14.1:-5).

Although this is the lesson where the course first introduce the idea that “the world is not real” – what will become a core concept as we progress – here the focus is on the meaning we have given to this illusory world.

We are not being asked to undo the world, but rather to see the way in which the meaning we have assigned it is contrary to the meaning which God gives it.

Thus, we walk through a litany of what frightens and annoys us about the world – its war and starvation, its heart attacks and viruses. We name each of these – we are as specific as possible – and then we say gently that it is our invention, not God’s creation.

What God did not create is not real and therefore need not be feared. We are shifting our mind from passive builder of nightmares to willing co-creator of happiness.

I’d like to speak a little also to an early experience I had that involves this lesson. It has to do with how the course undid – painfully and abruptly – my concept of God.

When I first discovered A Course in Miracles, I loved it. It fascinated me; it fulfilled me. I was all in right away. Awakening, it seemed, was just a stone’s throw away. I was – as I had always suspected – a favored son of God about to be elevated to His right hand.

Then, one morning while walking my mind just crumbled. Abruptly – like falling into a cold lake – I realized that God as A Course in Miracles understood God was definitely not the God with whom I was familiar. The course was talking about a God that was wholly loving and creative in a real way, albeit a way incomprehensible to human thought.  The God I believed in was an intelligent actor who controlled life the way I controlled chess boards. And he didn’t move pieces to win – he moved them because it pleased him. And sometimes pain and anguish was what pleased him. It was a god of punishment, a god of hate.

The difference between those two concepts of God is a canyon. I couldn’t believe that after all these years – therapy, meditation, Thomas Merton, steady churchgoing, ACIM – that I was still beholden to a God that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. It was as if the course had drawn back a veil to reveal the inner horror show that drove me. I hated the course that day.

And so here’s what Lesson 14 does for me: it reminds me that I have not given up completely on the God with whom I grew up. No rational person – given a choice between a cruel and indifferent God and a perfectly loving one would choose the former. But I am not rational. 

For some of us, dredging up a catalog of personal horrors isn’t a big deal. For me – for one simple reason – it was. Because in the deep place we rarely go – where we are so scared to shine the light – I believe that God did create those horrors. And they are lying in wait as punishment for my sins.

Each time I say God didn’t create cancer or war or whatever, a voice that responds, “oh yes he did. You know he made cancer and serial killers and random accidents that kill children. If you deny it, he’s going to get you.”

I know from an intellectual place how sad and pathetic that is. Please understand that! But I cannot deny its existence. Denying it means that it won’t be healed. 

So what do we do? What did I do?

For starters, we own whatever it is that we want to deny or blame on others. We refuse to hide it. We say, “here you go, Jesus. You said there’s no order of difficulty in miracles? Well, I’ve got a doozy for you.”

And then we do the lesson. I just did it. I say to God, “this one? I don’t buy it. But I’ll do it. I’m not going to get anything out of it, but I’ll do it.” I follow it to the T – no more, no less. Tomorrow’s another day.

And there is something in all of that – owning it, being honest with Jesus or whatever symbol of Love works for us – that is peaceful unto itself. That’s all I can say. You face your demons and it doesn’t seem like Jesus or God does anything for you in that moment, but when it’s over you feel . . . normal. You can go home and make popcorn for the kids and play games. You can make a healthy dinner for the family instead of blacking out with booze. One foot after another. One little prayer after another. Something is working.

And then one day you realize those demons are gone, as if they were never real in the place. And you didn’t even hear them leave . . . 

In the years since that dark morning – when I faced the God of my childhood in fear and trembling, unsure of the alternative – I have come to realize that a lot of healing takes place without our knowing it. I have gotten better at accepting this and at showing up, day after day. I often paraphrase Meister Eckhart who said that “the mind with which I know God is the mind with which God knows me.” There is peace and quiet – and even some gratitude – merely in our willingness to be in the process, however we define it. It is not our peace and quiet and gratitude. It is God’s For only what God makes is real. 

←Lesson 13
Lesson 15→

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A Course in Miracles Lesson 13

A meaningless world engenders fear.

ACIM Lesson 13 is the first time in the workbook that we encounter the phrase “the ego” (W-p1.13.2:2). This is a significant textual development, because it subtly introduces the concept that we are not the “we” we think we are. As well, this lesson includes powerful language about our active opposition to God which, as the Author clearly indicates, is likely to cause considerable resistance.

We are again working with the idea that the world we see is meaningless. In lesson 12 of A Course in Miracles, we explored the possibility that this meaninglessness is what upsets us and causes us to frantically impose our own “meaning” on what we see. It also made clear that there was an alternative – that is, God’s meaning.

Lesson 13 is a strong witness for a) why we are not already perceiving God’s meaning and b) why we aren’t likely to experience it any time soon. Understanding this means understanding why we’re now being introduced to the ego as well as the likely cause of our inner resistance to God.

In ACIM terms, the ego – while psychologically resonant – is not precisely the ego to which Freud (and others) introduced us. Rather, it is the entire psychological self – id, ego and superego if you like. We construct a false self based on family, culture, history,  memory, body, etc. And then we decide that this fictional construction – for it is, in the end, simply a story we tell – is who we really are. We equate ourselves entirely with that ego – that story, that idea, that construct.

Lesson 13 suggests – as countless religious traditions and spiritual gurus from Advaita Vedanta to J. Krishnamurti to Eckhart Tolle have taught – that the ego is neither who nor what we are in truth.

Thus the question: who are we? Who is it that is asking these questions? Who is it that creates the false self and why?

While I am not suggesting that anyone wear sackcloth, smear their skin with ash, fast until they’re faint, or render their lives a long miserable and bitter exercise in negation, I do suggest that answering these questions should not be taken lightly. They are at the very heart of our experience as human beings in search of meaning. We cannot know peace or joy – we cannot know God – until we have answered them (or, in truth, learned that we already know and are the answer).

Still, asking these questions needs to be a priority. After all, Atonement is a total commitment (T-2.II.7:1).

The ego then is a defensive gesture, a defensive construct. It is the voice that speaks against God, justifying the separation and maintaining it through guilt and fear and hate. Faced with a meaningless world, the ego “rushes in” to supply meaning (W-pI.13.2:3), and all of its images and narratives and excuses and rationales have but one objective: to ensure that we – the we we truly are – never questions its existence and thus never reaches God.

The ego teaches that we are pitted against God in a death match. And – crazier yet – that we actually have a chance of defeating God.

In truth, we neither want – nor could persevere in – such a conflict.

Ego is our default – our learned, our habitual – response to the meaningless world. Seeing this meaninglessness – and reckoning with the fear it engenders – is how we make contact with another, better way.

Our resistance to the ideas in Lesson 13 is likely to be profound. Our ability to think our way out of it is probably going to be very convincing. What? Me hate God? Impossible! I pray every morning and every night. I’ve got a shelf full of books all of which celebrate my love of the Divine. I adore the Lord. Adore Him.

We’re happy to acknowledge a certain difficulty in reaching God, perhaps. We’re cool with recognizing a degree of spiritual inconsistency. But outright conflict?

That’s got to be somebody else.

And yet, do we really know peace? Do we really experience ourselves solely as the Love and Light of God? Or do we catch only glimpses of that Love and Light as we frantically navigate a world of entropy and decay and violence and pain?

We can’t lie to ourselves about this forever. It hurts and it hurts bad but we have to see it clearly before it can be healed. And if we can’t accept that our active resistance to God is a fact, then can we at least consider the possibility that it might be true? That there is perhaps a better way? And that our way isn’t working?

So on the one hand, I think this lesson is enormous – the project of a lifetime. It marks the introduction of a critical concept – the ego – which in turn opens the door to radical inner work, the likes of which most of us have not yet undertaken, or have undertaken only half-heartedly. It makes clear that we have set a false self up in direct opposition to God, and believe we are that self. Our good intentions and sincere beliefs that this isn’t true are just the ego persuading us not to look closely at it.

This is heavy stuff.

Yet on the other hand, Lesson 13 is also simply another little step in the direction of Heaven.  The last sentences of this lesson are meant literally: don’t even think about these ideas right now outside of practicing the lesson (W-p1.13.6:2-3). It’s too much and we’re not ready for it all at once.

Reversing cause and effect – which is the big correction which underlies this and so many other course lessons – is a major principle of A Course in Miracles. Here, we’re simply being asked to consider the possibility that meaninglessness makes us fearful and that we’re apt to respond to that fear in a way that walls God out.

We don’t have to get this all at once. It’s okay if we don’t understand it. It’s okay if we feel resistant to it – or angry about it – or scared of it. All we are ever really asked to offer in these lessons is our little willingness. It is always sufficient.

This is what I find so comforting about A Course in Miracles: it undoes our false beliefs with saint-like intensity yet simultaneously makes clear that we are loved, we are perfect, and that the end is sure so long as we’re willing to toddle along in the right direction. The more we can accept the loving embrace implied in the gentle voice that guides us, the faster and farther we’re going go. We really aren’t doing this alone.

←Lesson 12
Lesson 14→

Reading A Course in Miracles: Healing as a Release from Fear

Healing as a release from fear introduces a key component of A Course in Miracles: Atonement, rightly understood, is a remedy (T-2.IV.1:5). It is a principle which guides the application of miracles. Miracles, in turn, are a means of delivering a remedy to that which is sick (T-2.IV.1:2). Thus, a sick mind – which is a fearful mind – is healed by miracles according to the principle of Atonement, which is love.

Healing is not itself a miracle; rather, it’s a description of Atonement through miracles: we are released from fear, and experience the effect as healing.

In this sense, A Course in Miracles conceives of its students as both in need of healing at the level of mind and, also at the level of mind, as healers in their own right – of their own selves and others.

Essential to the healing process contemplated by the course is understanding that it aims solely at releasing from the fear that is our own miscreation. Indeed, it is only at the level of mind that healing has actual meaning (T-2.IV.2:4). Whatever apparent effects it may have in our life in the world is beside the point.

This can be both confusing and frustrating and therefore fear-inducing.

Our lives – even our own self – are comprised of distinctions, or differences. We fragment experience, both in terms of objects and events, and then we give differing values to the various fragments.

Thus, my biological son is more important than my nephew and both are more important than some kid half a world away, who I’ve never met. Winning the lottery is better than losing a job. And a diagnosis of no cancer is better than a diagnosis of cancer.

We tend to experience those issues as being of different orders and magnitudes. If my daughter catches the flu, that’s different than a difficult meeting with my supervisor at work, which is different from not having a quarter for the parking meter, which is different from being told I have lung cancer, and so forth.

It is all but impossible to perceive both body and the world brought forth according to that body without these splits and divisions and valuations. In fact, trying to do is is generally only exacerbates the fragmentation and resultant fear and confusion (e.g., T-2.IV.3:8-10).

Since we take the separation as fact, our inclination is to approach experience on its own terms. That is, if I am diagnosed with cancer, then I get chemotherapy. If I am overly anxious, then I see a therapist and perhaps take a pill. If I lose my job and can’t pay my mortgage, then I get a new job. This approach to problem-solving seems reasonable. It seems natural.

But A Course in Miracles is clear: whatever “problems” we have are merely symptoms of the only problem we really have, which is our perceived separation from God, which is fear-inducing (W-pI.79.1:4). The problem is not that life is hard or that sometimes circumstances run contrary to our preferences. The problem is that we are fearful, and our fear makes the presence of love almost impossible to notice, let alone avail ourselves of. Our belief in the separation as a fact makes us feel guilty for having left God and fearful of divine retribution. We miscreate and then double down on the error by believing in what we’ve miscreated.

It is essential not to underestimate the degree to which this guilt and fear obscure love and lead to our painful lives in a world of apparent scarcity, from which death is the only release. Healing it can take thousands of years (W-pI.97.3:2).

Atonement heals fear by enabling us to see it for the self-made sham that it is. This clear seeing – what we might call “visioning” – in turn naturally allows us to remember that there is nothing about which we need to feel guilt. We did not – because one can not – part ways with God. There is nothing to fear because nothing happened.

It’s easy enough to write that. But making it the foundation of our actual experience in the world we share with others can be quite challenging.

Healing as Release from Fear emphasizes that we have to heal our errors at the level on which they seem to occur (T-2.IV.2:3). It’s helpful to know that all fear comes from our misguided understanding of our relationship with God, an idea that reflects miscreation (T-2.VII.3:5-6, 14). But we still have to figure out how to handle public speaking. Or asking somebody out on a date. Or trying a new recipe. Or going to the dentist. Or dying.

That is, we still have to live our lives in these bodies, on terms the bodies and the world set forth. But this is not a crisis! The body is an effective learning device for the mind (T-2.IV.3:1), especially when the mind is given to the retraining contemplated by A Course in Miracles. We don’t have to fight it or fix it; we simply have to give attention to the lessons as they arise.

How does this retraining – this giving of attention – work?

If we see our experience in the world as an extension of fear-based thinking, then we can respond to that experience with love. Indeed, that is the best use to which we can put the world as it is brought forth by our minds. It is a means by which we heal the separation (T-2.III.5:12). Whatever we face in the world – regardless of its apparent significance or magnitude, regardless of the level of our emotional response to it – it is there in order that it might help heal us from fear and thus facilitate our reunion with our brothers and sisters in God.

This often creates tension for many students, especially with respect to bodily issues (such as food or sex or illness). The course asserts that worldly (or physical) remedies are magic (T-2.IV.2:8). This includes aspirin, Penicillin, talk therapy and art therapy and physical therapy, tarot and yes, even A Course in Miracles. All are magic. All are “non-creative agents” that cannot heal, because they do not exist at the level of mind (T-2.IV.4:3).

And again: at the level of mind, which is the only creative level, the only problem is always fear, which we made (T-2.VII.3:1), and the only cure is love, which God created, and which we can learn to create again (e.g., T-11.in.3:1-2, T-11.I.3:4-5, 8).

Yet it is better to accept these varied “magical” remedies than to take none at all. Why? Because implicit in the concept of healing as a release from fear, is the recognition that what we are learning is not easy. In fact, it appears – and so tends to be experienced – as quite difficult. Thus, we are allowed – encouraged even – to accept healing in whatever form it appears. If chemotherapy appears viable and loving, then get chemotherapy. If changing your job appears viable and loving, then change your job.

Sometimes . . . illness has a sufficiently strong hold over the mind to render a person temporarily inaccessible to the Atonement. In this case it may be wise to utilize a compromise approach to mind and body, in which something from the outside is temporarily given healing belief (T-2.IV.4:5-6).

Small steps are not signs of a “bad” ACIM student. There are no “bad” ACIM students. We are simply accepting as much love and miracle-mindedness as we can at this or that stage of our learning. So long as we remain open to ongoing shifts in thinking, it’s okay. It’s more than okay.

The value of the Atonement does not lie in the manner in which is it expressed. In fact, if it is used truly, it will inevitably be used in whatever way is most helpful to the receiver. This means that a miracle, to attain its full efficacy, must be expressed in a language that the recipient can understand without fear (T-2.IV.5:1-3).

Healing releases us from fear; it does not increase our fear (T-2.IV.5:6).

So do we really need to walk our dog in the forest and listen to birds in order to feel close to God? Do we have to sit quietly in the morning with our coffee, praying to God, and listening for a reply? Do we really have to do the lessons of A Course in Miracles? Drink kale smoothies? Do cardiovascular exercise? Avoid trans fats?

Of course not.

And also? Of course we do.

The rituals and events and activities that appears to us as loving, kind, nurturing, supportive, enriching – in a word, helpful – matter. In the dream of separation, they are symbols of love. When we give ourselves to them, both accepting and extending them, we both heal and are healed.

It is okay – it is more than okay – to undo fear at the level at which fear appears.

If it is appropriate in time to be led beyond those symbols – to new symbols, say, or beyond symbols altogether – then that will be made clear (e.g., T-2.IV.5:4-5). Our job is to be willing to be released from fear. It is not our job to decide where, when or how much fear will be released. It is not our job to decide what the observable worldly effects will be, or whether there will be such effects at all.

We show up; we avail ourselves of the course; and healing happens.

Thus, in a sense, Healing as a Release from Fear is an invitation to look into our personal symbols of love and healing. It doesn’t matter if healing means watching cardinals at the feeder, or hand-knitting gnomes, or making blueberry pancakes for your kids, or going for long walks in the rain, or following a strict vegan diet, or being celibate, or playing dungeons and dragons, or writing poetry, or . . .

If it is healing – if it is experienced as helpful – then it is healing. Trust that. The form in which healing appears is never the point; the content (which is always either fear or love (both of which mandate the same response: love)), infusing the form is the point.

In this respect, it can feel as if miracle workers are asked not to leave the world but to become even more a part of it. To deepen their attachment to and investment in it.

Well, maybe. Or in a way.

But more accurately, miracle workers ask of everything they experience and encounter: what is it for? (T-2.II.3:2) Is our engagement with the world based on a sincere desire to be healed of fear? And to help others be healed of fear has well?

That is, are we responding with love to everything, regardless of whether it appears as loving or fearful (in whatever form those abstractions assume for us)?

That is the question and our work is to learn how to say yes, over and over, for ourselves and one another, until we are all home in God.

A Course in Miracles Lesson 12

I am upset because I see a meaningless world.

Again, with this lesson we build on previous lessons – working increasingly to both understand and take responsibility for the role our minds play in creating the world that we see and experience. Lesson 12 drives the point home. Our upset – call it anger, fear, guilt, shame, distress, worry, sadness, loneliness etc. – is not caused by the world. Those feelings – those impressions – are what we have projected onto the world. The real source of our stress is our perception of meaninglessness, and our unwillingness to become responsible for it.

Two things stand out in this lesson of A Course in Miracles. The first is the beautiful wording – poetic, actually – that describes just what is happening in this process of projection.

If you could accept the world as meaningless and let the truth be written upon it for you, it would make you indescribably happy. But because it is meaningless, you are impelled to write upon it what you would have it be. It is this you see in it. It is this that is meaningless in truth. Beneath your words is written the Word of God (W-pI.12.5:3-7).

Few passages of the either the text or workbook are as clear and precise as this. We perceive what we want to perceive. It is a choice we make, one that we can undo – and make again, differently – whenever we want. The truth – God’s Word – is already there, waiting. Beneath the anguish and hostility, the guilt and fear that is our text is God’s text, clean, shining and pure. Which would we rather see?

If we can understand this distinction – and accept it – and then bring it into application (Tara Singh‘s phrase for walking the walk of any spiritual path)  – then we both understand and are practicing what A Course in Miracles aims to teach.

So in this respect, Lesson 12 is an opportunity – early in the process – to begin taking responsibility for projection and learning how peace arises when we stop insisting on our interpretation of experience.

The second aspect of this lesson that is worth noticing is the way in which it declares that our upset is directly related – can be traced to – the world’s apparent meaninglessness. In other words, logic would seem to dictate that we’re upset because we see violence, poverty, hunger, loneliness, anger, greed etc. Those things upset us – it’s obvious, right?

But A Course in Miracles is explicit: the source of our stress is our unwillingness to simply accept the meaninglessness of the world. We can’t bear it and so we rush to fill it. The rush to fill it becomes our stress because what we add is not meaning but confusion. Lesson 12 is an invitation to simply allow the meaninglessness to be what it is, to see its fundamental neutrality.

What is meaningless is neither good nor bad. Why, then, should a meaningless world upset you? If you could accept the world as meaningless and let the truth be written upon it for you, it would make you indescribably happy (W-pI.12.5:1-3).

Thus, if we can accept meaninglessness for what it really is – which is neither good nor bad but simply an entirely neutral fact – then what we will perceive on it will be God’s Word, which is our happiness and our rest.

There is a clear – if unstated – subtext here. There are two ways of looking at the world – one is our own (call it the ego’s) and one is with Jesus and/or the Holy Spirit, both of whom enable us to patiently wait for the inevitable revelation of God’s Word.

Thus, one of the questions that Lesson 12 asks us to answer is: with whom are we looking at the world? Are we asking Jesus to join us? Are we inviting the Holy Spirit to share its vision?

Or are we simply surrendering to the throes of ego? Are we doubling down on our perception, our understanding, our vision of life in the world?

There is – there is always – another way. Are we ready to avail ourselves of it?

←Lesson 11
Lesson 13→

A Course in Miracles Lesson 11

My meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world.

The first ten lessons are essentially an introduction to how our bodies function with respect to meaning and purpose. We are being invited to rethink – literally – the way in which mind is experienced in and as a body.

The upshot of those lessons is to undermine our settled understanding of the body and subtly shift our thinking away from sensation and towards the activity of mind. 

Lesson 11 is the first lesson of A Course in Miracles which yokes this shift to the world.

The world and our bodies are a single movement – the one brings the other forth. Our physical senses manifest a world and our brain provides a narrative about that world. It is persuasive and convincing. It seems to just be the way it is.

Our understanding of that movement is not that the one brings the other forth, but rather that our bodies are simply noticing what already exists. There really is a pine tree, with a chickadee singing in it, with the sun setting over the horizon outside my window. And it really is beautiful. And beauty really does make me feel happy, joyous and free.

Lesson eleven is the beginning of reversing this structure of cause-and-effect.

Today’s idea introduces the concepts that your thoughts determine the world you see. Be glad indeed to practice the idea in its initial form, for in this idea is your release made sure. The key to forgiveness lies in it (W-pI.11.1:3-5).

If you believe that cause is external – if that belief is reflected in your thought, if it effectively is your thought – then that is how the world will appear. It will rain on your picnic and you will feel sorrow because your picnic was ruined.

But the cause of joy is interior and rain – and picnics – can neither bring it forth nor shut it down nor modify it in any way.

The course does not ask us to believe this – that would be too big a leap at this juncture. Rather, it asks us – in a mild and gentle way – to simply give attention to the possibility of it. We’re talking about three to five minutes of practice over the course of a single day.

It is like learning how to swim by taking one small step after another ever deeper into the pool. And at any juncture, we can slow down. There is no being thrown in the deep end here.

This lesson – the world is meaningless when and as it proceeds from meaningless thoughts – is the foundation of forgiveness, which A Course in Miracles defines as “the healing of the perception of separation” (T-3.V.9:1).

Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error from the beginning, and thus keeping it unreal for you. Do not let any belief in its realness enter your mind, or you will also perceive that you must undo what you have made in order to be forgiven (T-9.IV.5:3-4).

What never happened cannot have effects. What is not real cannot have effects. This is the shift in thinking offered by A Course in Miracles.

In a sense, lesson 11 is a big step. It is the first time that we are explicitly told that what we see or perceive is our responsibility. What we perceive – war, famine, loneliness, poverty and the corresponding grief and suffering – extends from our mind because of our confusion about how cause and effect actually function. When at last we begin to understand accept this, then we draw near “peace, relaxation and freedom from worry” (W-p-I.11.3:4). 

Early versions of A Course in Miracles include the admonition that part of asking Jesus what miracles to do automatically meant that we also ask him what miracles not to do. Miracle workers, in their enthusiasm and lovingkindness – but also in their tendency to overestimate their spiritual progress – are inclined to do everything. Heal this and heal that and then go knock on doors to find more opportunities to heal. 

But the course advises us to relax. To breathe. To accept the viability of baby steps and trust that salvation is in better hands than ours. 

I raise this because Lesson 11 is fun. I like it and, because the workbook indicates that it’s critical to the foundation of peace and joy, I want to get it right. I want to get it perfect. But implicit in the ACIM curriculum is the fact that we are always right where we are meant to be. We are learning what we are meant to learn and this juncture, with these companions, through these circumstances. 

Ego resists that truth and masks my resistance to with good intentions. But Spirit – when I give it space and listen to it quietly speak – says thank you for your trust. In the end, its gratitude is all we need.

←Lesson 10
Lesson 12→