Thank You for Being My Savior

Yesterday I wrote about release from guilt, drawing on Chapter Thirteen of A Course in Miracles. The suggestion there is that we undo guilt by loving all our brothers and sisters equally, without condition or qualification. Good advice, hard to follow.

Here I want to make a slightly different, more personal point about guilt: You are not guilty. You have not done anything wrong. You can’t do anything wrong.

If you will believe this – or at least believe that I believe it – then the separation will naturally dissolve and you will know again the peace and happiness that are your inheritance (T-in.1:7).

But first, we want to be clear about what we mean by guilt.

Imagine we go out for coffee, your treat. You pay and a loose twenty flutters to the floor. You don’t notice so I pocket it. Later I feel guilty.

This is not the guilt of which A Course in Miracles speaks. This is not the guilt which obscures our identity as Christ.

Feeling guilty for taking money that does not belong to us makes sense in the world. It induces pro-social behavior that raises the happiness waterline for all of us. You don’t want people stealing from you so don’t steal from them (T-1.III.6:4).

A Course in Miracles refers to a deeper, more sinister guilt.

Guilt is more than merely not of God. It is the symbol of attack on God . . . Fear of retaliation from without follows, because the severity of the guilt is so acute that it must be projected (T-5.V.2:9-10, 3:11).

We believe we attacked God by separating from God. We feel guilty for this attack and we’re terrified of divine punishment and retribution. We project this fear outward and make a world of pain and suffering, full of conflict and enemies, and endlessly unhappy compromises.

But here is the thing: you can’t be separate from God and Creation (for the same reason that you can’t be separate from yourself – look into this!). Separation is not a problem that you have to solve; it’s a problem you have to see is not actually a problem. It’s like you think you lost your glasses and then discover you’ve been wearing them all along.

We aren’t fixing anything. We are seeing that nothing needs to be fixed. A Course in Miracles can never do more than spin us in circles until we realize this.

You aren’t separate from the cosmos, from Creation, at all; you are an extension of Creation. All of Creation is you, and you are all of Creation. This is simple and obvious but for your insane and complex belief to the contrary. We don’t need to study oneness. We need to look at the mistaken belief that blocks our awareness of oneness.

You never attacked God because it’s impossible to attack God. And yet you do feel guilty. You do feel fear. You do project your fear. You do live by the law of attack and defense.

Thus, for all intents and purposes, you have attacked God.

How, then, can you heal? Our best thinking and good intentions got us into this mess. Do you really think another thought or insight or institution is going to be the one that finally saves you?

Healing begins when we resign as our own healer, and consent instead to be healed by the Holy Spirit.

Your learning potential, properly understood, is limitless because it will lead you to God. You can teach the way to Him and learn it, if you follow the Teacher Who knows the way to Him and understands His curriculum for learning it . . . You need offer only undivided attention (T-12.V.9:1-2, 4).

The Holy Spirit heals us by gently teaching us that we did not do the thing we fear we did. The lesson is easy and the Teacher gentle. Nor are we left alone for any aspect of our learning.

If you look at separation, especially when and where it seems most averse to being looked at (i.e., those you hate, those you ignore), then you will eventually see that separation is an illusion. You will catch a glimpse of wholeness in your brother or sister, and that glimpse will be enough. It will take you all the way to the well and the mountain. It will take you all the way to Heaven.

How do you catch that glimpse?

One way is to allow me to remind you that you are innocent, forever one in and with Creation. Your wholeness is radiant; it is literally the only reason I write – so that I can catch my own glimpse of your perfection. Perceiving your wholeness, I remember our shared holiness, and thus offer it to you in my clumsy, wordy way. You are not guilty. You have not done anything wrong. You can’t do anything wrong.

How else can you be my savior and the savior of the world?

A Course in Miracles Lesson 165

Let not my mind deny the Thought of God.

It is not possible to be separated from God. But it is possible to deny our oneness with God. We can ignore grace but we cannot undo it. We cannot make what is true false. Our happiness and peace depend on a right understanding of what we are in truth and on our willingness to accept that reality, rather than resist it.

This lesson begins with four questions, each of which is aimed at revealing the depth and intensity of our self-denial. They are leading questions – each supposing a variation of the answer “I am doing this to myself” (T-27.VIII.10:1).

So this lesson basically has two parts: remind us that we are not – because we cannot be – separate from God and, to the extent we feel we are separate from God, to remember that we are the ones driving that separation and that there is – thank Christ there is – another way.

Deny not Heaven. It is yours today, but for the asking . . . Ask to receive, and it is given you (W-pI.165.4:1-2, 4).

What tends to stand in the way of accepting Heaven is doubt. We don’t believe that we’re worthy. Or we believe that God is capricious and unreliable. Or we’re on the wrong spiritual path and the right one will make everything easier. All of these concerns are forms of doubt, which in turn are forms of fear.

Doubt brings forth the idea of sacrifice and makes it appear meaningful. Doubt begets a personal sense of suffering because doubt always arises as confusion about what we are which, in turn, means that we are confused about joy and pain (e.g. T-7.X.3:6-7).

Conviction lies within [Heaven]. Till you welcome it as yours, uncertainty remains. Yet God is fair. Sureness is not required to receive what only your acceptance can bestow (W-pI.165.4:5-8).

The end of doubt is certainty, but certainy comes when we ask for it with real desire, and then accept without condition or qualification what is given in response. Do you want the peace of God? Then the peace of God is there, by virtue of your desire for it. It is not God’s intention that we should go without the sure knowledge of our identity.

Would God consent to let His Son remain forever starved by his denial of the nourishment he needs to live? Abundance dwells in him, and deprivation cannot cut him off from God’s sustaining Love and from his home (W-pI.165.6:5-6).

The suggestion is that we lean not our own certainty – which is feeble and compromised at best – but rather on God’s. Where God abides, truth abides, and where truth abides there can be no doubt. Hence the injunction to not deny the Thought of God but rather to accept that it cannot be absent from us (W-pI.165.7:2-3-5, 8:1). Even if we think or feel otherwise, we cannot be absent from God.

Our willingness to practice in this way is what matters. The gift has already been given; God’s grace is already our only reality and thus our only identity. We merely open our minds to remember what is already inherent in them. Beyond fear and hate, beyond doubt and anger, is the quiet stillness of Love in which all dreams end, including the happy dream of being host to that which is all-encompassing and eternal. Today we let a few beams of divine light in to warm us and show the way forward to the peace that – for a little while longer yet – surpasses understanding.

←Lesson 164
Lesson 166→

A Course in Miracles Lesson 164

Now we are one with Him Who is our Source.

Judgment requires time. We evaluate the present by comparing it to the past in anticipation of the future. Today is better than yesterday which bodes well for tomorrow.

Today, A Course in Miracles invites us to let judgment go, and discover in the Holy Instant our natural relationship with Christ.

How holy is your practicing today, as Christ gives you His sight and hears for you, and answer in your name the Call He hears! How quiet is the time you give to spend with Him, beyond the world. How easily are all your seeming sins forgot, and all your sorrows unremembered (W-pI.164.3:1-3).

Lesson 164 is a good example of how A Course in Miracles sometimes uses highly poetic language to draw our attention away from the world, and guide our practice to a place that does not rely on formal application (say this, do that, for this allotted number of minutes, et cetera). It’s kin to a spiritual pep talk. It trusts us with the invitation to go beyond both body and world.

There is a silence into which the world cannot intrude. There is an ancient peace you carry in your heart and have not lost. There is a sense of holiness in you the thought of sin has never touched (W-pI.164.4:1-3).

It is okay to let those words move us; they are offered the way they are for that very purpose. It is okay to hold a lofty goal for the day – to remember Christ, to feel Christ as near as your very self, and to remember the Call of God to shared Divine Stillness.

We want to enter the day’s prayerful spaces with confidence. Not with greed – not with a desire for personal accomplishment. But with the quiet assurance that we are still as God created us (e.g., W-pI.162.6:3), and that awareness of God’s Love is our birthright (In.1:7).

Nor do we pray for ourselves alone.

We stand forgiven in the sight of Christ, with all the world forgiven in our own. We bless the world, as we hold it in the light in which our Savior looks on us, and offer it the freedom given us through His forgiving vision, not our own (W-pI.164.7:5-6).

The title of this lesson makes clear its ultimate objective: the memory of our perfect unity with God, our Creator. When this unity is recalled and known, then time ends and the world is saved because nothing happened. If that is too big a metaphysical pill to swallow, consider simply accepting – however briefly – the end of suffering and the beginning of eternal joy.

This is the promise A Course in Miracles makes: that we will remember we are not separate from either Creator or creation, and that in that memory the grace and peace of Christ will become us, allowing us to heal every mind that yet believes it is separate and alone.

Truly, if we are ready and willing, today will be the day we return home.

←Lesson 163
Lesson 165→

Choosing between Two Teachers

I want to point out a two-step process that has been very helpful in my practice of A Course in Miracles specifically and, more generally, in my practice of becoming happy and peaceable to a Christ-like degree.

The first step is learning to discern between the Voice of the Holy Spirit and the voice of ego. They truly are two different teachers, and we are listening to one or the other all the time, and seeing this, and knowing the difference is incredibly helpful. Without knowing the difference, we can only stumble and flail about. A rigorous spiritual practice begins with our ability to discern between helpful and unhelpful teachers.

This “rigorous spiritual practice” is the second step because it is the step of choosing to listen to the Holy Spirit rather than the ego. That is hard to do. It is hard to do it once or twice a day, let alone retrain our mind to hear only and always the Holy Spirit. But that’s the path.

So those steps go together, like a dance or a recipe.

Sometimes people ask how do you tell the difference between the two voices?

Ego always argues and its case always involves the body’s welfare, one way or the other. Ego changes tone a lot – it cajoles, flatters, debates, teases, belittles, rages. Its only value is whatever gets the job done.

And yet.

The ego is nothing more than a part of your belief about yourself. Your other life has continued without interruption, and has been and always will be totally un affected by your attempts to dissociate it (T-4.VI.1:7-8).

Holy Spirit does not argue because it does not recognize any conflict. It does not try to force anything because it respects our decision-making power. It isn’t trying to sell anything because it knows we have everything. It is always calm and confident, and it will always share with us its confidence.

[The Holy Spirit] is in complete and direct communication with every aspect of creation, because it is in complete and direct communication with its Creator. This communication is the Will of God. Creation and communication are synonymous (T-4.VII.3:4-6).

Ego basically argues that you’re vulnerable and in need of help, and only it can help you, and it works frantically – without any consistent ethics or morals – to keep you scared and dependent.

The Holy Spirit always reminds you of your fundamental innocence as a condition of being Creation Itself, thus teaching you how to create like your Creator.

Ego breeds an endless cycle of conflict / temporary solution / conflict. The Holy Spirit blesses you with happiness and inner peace that is unconditional. You have to actively refuse it in order not to know it.

Therefore, it is natural to ask: why is it so hard to hear only the Holy Spirit? It offers us everything. Shouldn’t it be easier to give attention to it?

It’s hard because you and I are on the fence. We are willing to consider – mostly intellectually – that we’re not bodies and the world isn’t real, but we don’t actually believe it. Basically we are hedging our bets. And there is no middle ground in salvation (T-28.VII.2:7).

And the further truth is, we’ve been indoctrinated by ego. So the Holy Spirit’s suggestions and directives can seem illogical or even dangerous. We are so attached to ego’s endless litany of reaction, attack, defense, et cetera that anything else sounds alien and foolish. It feels right to ignore it.

So, you know, you lose your job and ego starts shouting “hire a lawyer! Beef up your resume! Polish that Linked-In profile! Call so-and-so and complain loudly about how you were treated! Revisit your anger at your father/wife/partner!”

And the Holy Spirit says, “do nothing.” Or “ask your neighbor if they need a hand with anything.”

Or maybe you’re fixated on ending war. Ego has ideas about this. “Tweet more! Argue with strangers on Facebook! Go to a rally! Tear down your neighbor’s political sign! Obsess about how wrong people can be! Pick a fight! Pick two fights!”

And the Holy Spirit says, “you haven’t gone for a walk with so-and-so for years – give them and call and see if they’re up for a hike.”

You are trying to save your house and family, or establish world peace, and the Holy Spirit seems oddly uninterested in these noble pursuits. It just nudges you to be a better friend or to sit quietly with tea watching birds at the feeder or wash the bathroom floor or whatever. Its priorities seem ridiculous.

It takes a long time to trust that the Holy Spirit is, in fact, the Voice for God, and that its suggestions always bring more peace both to you and all your brothers and sisters. But this is the way, and there is no other. “All other traits of God’s Teachers rest on trust” (M-4.II.1:1).

Right-mindedness listens to the Holy Spirit, forgives the world, and through Christ’s vision sees the real world in its place. This is the final vision, the last perception, the condition in which God takes the final step Himself (C-I.5:2-3).

Ego is still the default, which is why conflict remains so pervasive, and why happiness and peace are always coming and going. But ego is not inevitable. Violence and suffering are not inevitable. And there is something that is inevitable – our union with our Creator. “God is inevitable, and you cannot avoid Him any more than He can avoid you” (T-4.I.9:11).

Learn to distinguish between the two teachers, and you will see how only one offers anything you actually want. Then listen only to that Teacher and follows Its guidance, no matter how seemingly insignificant or silly. It asks so little of us, and offers so much.

ACIM and the End of War

There is no way to God, just like there is no way to the self. You are already fully present; so, too, is God. Wholeness is not waiting to be reconstructed; it is waiting to be recognized.

The Wholeness of God, which is His peace, cannot be appreciated except by a whole mind that recognizes the Wholeness of God’s Creation. By this recognition it knows its Creator (T-6.II.1:2-3).

The salient quality of wholeness is inclusion (e.g., T-6.II.1:4). God’s Creation excludes nothing. You and I exclude a lot. So one way to begin to remember wholeness is to notice who – and what – we insist must be apart from it.

Perhaps we want to exclude Vladimir Putin. He’s an autocrat and a warmonger. Perhaps we want to exclude Russian soldiers who target Ukrainian civilians. They are war criminals. This feels rational, no? In Heaven there is no war, so only peacemakers need apply.

Go slowly with me here.

We are dismayed by war because we know that violence and conflict are of the ego, and peace and happiness are of God.

But the solution to war is not the additional violence of excluding our brothers and sisters who make war. It is not the additional violence of choosing sides in war. All that merely doubles down on the original error that conflict has value in and of itself.

The one we reject is our savior, and by our rejection, we not only refuse to save them, we also deny our own salvation. This is obviously contrary to God and to Love.

There is complete forgiveness here, for there is no desire to exclude anyone from your completion, in sudden recognition of the value of his part in it. In the protection of your wholeness, all are invited and made welcome (T-15.VII.14:6-7).

Nonviolence is not an optional response to conflict. It is the only response that actually means anything, because it is the only one that refuses to accept the violence inherent in separation, and thus reestablishes our shared interest in peace and happiness with all our brothers and sisters.

To see any brother or sister as a wrongdoer who is worthy of exclusion is to effectively damn all of us, including our own self. This is what projection is, and also why projection is so effective at sustaining the illusion of separation.

The ego projects to exclude, and therefore to deceieve. The Holy Spirit extends by recognizing Himself in every mind, and thus perceives them as one . . . Wherever he looks He sees Himself, and because He is united He offers the whole Kingdom always (T-6.II.12:2-3, 5).

Thus, as I pointed out in yesterday’s newsletter, we have to become responsible for projection by refusing to do it. That means that when we are scared or angry, full of righteousness or hatred, convinced that conflict is just, et cetera, we have to do nothing other than just sit with the feelings.

To “sit” with our feelings is to give them – and the circumstances apparently giving rise to them – to the Holy Spirit. We aren’t projecting, arguing, improving or anything. We are simply refusing to be part of the ego’s war on God.

If you think this is merely a metaphor, and has no relationship to the war you perceive outside yourself, I encourage you to at least try it. Refuse the ego’s call to war – what happens? Refuse to crucify anyone, no matter how evil they seem – what happens?

I make you a promise: if you refuse to be a pawn in the ego’s bloody war, then you will remember God’s peace, because your refusal of ego is your acceptance of the Holy Spirit and its message of Love, which is God’s peace. Thus, you will feel abiding peace in your heart, and in your mind you will know with calm certainty exactly what you need to do to manifest this peace unto the world so that all our brothers and sisters might remember peace with you. Hint: it’s not about what you do but how you look.

When you look with gentle graciousness upon your brother, you are beholding [the Holy Spirit]. . . . You cannot see the Holy Spirit, but you can see your brothers truly. And the light in them will show you all that you need to see. When the peace in you has been extended to encompass everyone, the Holy Spirit’s function here will be accomplished (T-19.IV.3:2, 4-6).

Is it clear? Be still and hold all the world, all your brothers and sisters, without exception. Place no condition on this welcome. Hold the young mother who died with her baby outside a maternity hospital in Ukraine. Hold the baby. Hold the young men who fired the weapons who killed this woman and her child. Hold the profiteers who sell the weapons. Hold the so-called leaders who give the orders.

A Course in Miracles is not fucking around. It is a beautiful, radical, rigorous spiritual path. It is teaching us how to become peacemakers and saints, so that all our brothers and sisters – broadly defined to include butterflies, maple trees and rain drops – might rest in the peace and happiness of the wholeness that is our shared inheritance as creations of God.

God is; you are. There is no gap anywhere, only the mistaken perception of a gap. Yet in that gap are the seeds of war, starvation and pestilence (T-28.III.4:2-3). Will you join me in stillness today – a few moments only – in which we refuse to be combatants in ego’s endless conflict, and instead become peacemakers intent on allowing our minds to hold only those thoughts that we think with God?

There is an end to suffering and violence. I am telling you: together we are it.

A Course in Miracles Lesson 163

There is no death. The Son of God is free.

Bodies die. This is true for bees, elephants and human beings. It’s true for clouds and planets. It is even true of the universe. The one thing upon which the living can depend is the arrival of death. It is, as Emily Dickinson called it, “the postponeless Creature.”

Oddly, this lesson makes only one reference to bodies and that one is to the metaphorical body of the examplar Son of God (W-pI.163.4:4). Indeed, A Course in Miracles here is far more concerned about our response to physical death than to actually disproving it.

What can we infer from this?

For one thing, if you say “there is no death” to most people they are going to mount a nontrivial argument, pointing out all kinds of medical, biological, chemical data that “proves” death is real. Conclusion? Of course death is real. Only fools argue otherwise.

The course appears uninterested in that argument. It just doesn’t take it up. Why? Because to the body, death is always going to appear real. Bodies die – that is why ego wants us to associate with them, to become identified as a specific body. So long as you believe the body is your home, then death is going to be be a viable threat. There is no logic that undoes this.

So the lesson is less interested in a full-frontal assault on death, and more interested in getting us to notice the many forms death takes: anger, anxiety, sadness and doubt, among others (W-pI.163.1:2). And it emphasizes that all of these reflect our confused worships of death as “savior and as giver of release” (W-pI.163.1:3).

In other words, being in a body is stress-inducing, and we perceive death as our salvation from all that because it ends all that. And yet, suggests the course, all “that” is just death with a different name, and it has a singular goal that remains hidden from us: by recasting death as savior, it testifies that God is dead.

Here is the opposite of God proclaimed as lord of all creation, stronger than God’s Will for life, the endlessness of love, and Heaven’s perfect, changeless constancy. Here is the Will of the Father and of Son defeated finally, and laid to rest beneath the headstone death has placed upon the body of the holy Son of God (W-pI.163.4:3-4).

Essentially, the lesson is suggesting that we are wilful co-conspirators with ego in replacing God with death (W-pI.163.5:4). Suffering in myriad forms must follow.

Go along with the lesson for a minute. Okay – I’m not going to get into the finality of death, the obviousness of it, et cetera. I’m going to ask a different question: is God dead? Could God be dead?

I encourage you to ask that question and to give yourself space in which to hear the answer. Is God, in fact, dead?

I suggest that the answer is no. God is not dead. We may not yet have lost our fear of death, we may not yet understand how there can be no death, and we may not even know with perfect certainty God’s reality but of this we can be sure: God is not dead.

Look around you. Life is everywhere. It is in the trees and the birds who are in the trees. It is in the sunlight streaming onto each blade of grass, it is in every neighbor whose face you see and whose voice you hear, and it is in you, too, for you are here, now, indisputably.

If we give attention in a non-dramatic, sustainable way to life we will begin to see a process – a vast process – that transcends its various parts. It’s not about the blades of grass or the neighbors. A chickadee is life, yes, but life is so much vaster than the chickadee because it includes galaxies and nutrinos and oceans.

This vastness transcends us, as well. There are limits to our senses and our cognitive abilities. Life transcends our capacity for expression and comprehension. In this, it resembles – indeed, becomes coherent with – God, as the beautiful prayer at the end of this lesson makes clear.

We are Your messengers, and we would look upon the glorious reflection of Your Love which shines in everything. We live and move in You alone. We are not separate from Your eternal life (W-pI.163.9:2-4).

This lesson does not want to persuade us by logic. It wants to show us the futility of believing God can be dead, and it wants to show us that we have become unwilling agents of that particular lie. It takes very little effort to see that God is not dead, and that we are ourselves gently set in the life we share with our living God and with all living things that collectively are Creation (W-pI.163.9:6).

Don’t worry about death today. It’s not our concern. Rather, look to the life that you are given – right here, right now – and to each shining example of this life, each one of which has no function but to remind you that you live as your Creator lives. We celebrate life and not death today, and give thanks that it is so.

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