A Course in Miracles Lesson 155

I will step back and let Him lead the way.

Recent lessons have designed us as ministers of God, messengers of Love whose only function is to spread the peace and joy of Christ throughout the separation, in order to hasten its inevitable dissolution.

Today’s lesson emphasizes the method of our ministry. It is driven not by ego, but by our willingness to get out of the way. We consent to a ministry in which the terms and conditions of our work are not set by the world, nor anyone in it, but rather by the One Who knows the world is a vast illusion, capable only of causing suffering.

The world is an illusion. Those who choose to come to it are seeking for a place where they can be illusions, and avoid their own reality (W-pI.155.2:1-2).

A Course in Miracles charts a middle way between the path of renouncing the world while still believing it is real, and embracing the world beause it is real. Those paths lead to despair. The course’s middle way is the “happy dream,” a path that neither rejects nor accepts illusions, but simply passes through them, guided by Truth.

All roads lead to this one in the end. For sacrifice and deprivation are paths that lead nowhere, choices for defeat and aims that will remain impossible (W-pI.155.7:1-2).

On this path, we simply bear witness to the gentleness and certainty that truth provides. Salvation is accomplished; we merely recognize it with greater and greater clarity. The truth goes before us, “lighting up the path of ransom from illusion” (W-pI.155.8:2).

We pay nothing for our freedom. We walk with one another, supporting each other in our willingness to be finished with separation and the suffering it imposes on us, along with our brothers and sisters. The gaps we perceive between ourselves and everything else shrink. They cannot threaten us.

It does not matter that we do not understand how this is so. It does not matter that we can’t explain what it means to trust God. The joy and peace we feel is contagious, and it is this that our brothers and sisters need. The explanation can come after, if necessary.

You know now where you go. But One Who knows goes with you. Let Him lead you with the rest (W-pI.155.10:4-6).

We follow the truth in place of illusion, knowing it can only lead us to God.

Your feet are safely set upon the road that leads the world to God. Look not to ways that seem to lead you elsewhere. Dreams are not a worthy guide for you are are God’s Son (W-pI.155.13:1-3).

Our practice of this lesson requires us to be still and listen for God, whose “loving Voice” guides our journey into the quiet way of defenselessness and Heaven (e.g., W-pI.153.18:1-2). All God does is remind us of our innocence, which we share with all Creation, and thus alight in us the desire to know nothing else but God and Love.

Given peace and joy, what else would we ask for? And given peace and joy, what else would we offer others?

←Lesson 154
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A Course in Miracles Lesson 153

In my defenselessness my safety lies.

Few lessons upend our innate understanding of how to live as this one does. Self-defense is firmly established as a right in our mind, to be justly wielded in the service of righteousness. The idea that one would just surrender it and live without recourse to defense of any kind feels beyond foolish.

If we were bodies, then perhaps self-defense would be logical. Bodies are vulnerable; they do die. But we are not bodies (W-pI.199.8:7), and so our relationship to attack and defense must be different. We need to see the cycle of violence inherent in attack and defense, and see further how that cycle appears to trap us against our will.

It is as if a circl held [the mind] fast, wherein another circle bound it and another one in that, until escape no longer can be hoped for or obtained. Attack, defense; defense, attack, become the circle of the hours and the days that bind the mind in heavy bands of steel with iron overlaid, returning but to start again (W-pI.153.3:1-2).

This is not a trap we escape by struggle but by letting go. We stop fighting; we accept our innocence as the only strength we need; we let God’s Will be our guide in all things. But we cannot let go until we see the futility of anything else. So long as we cling to the idea that our strength, our ideas, our will is sufficient, we will remain stuck.

Indeed, this lesson suggests that even at our most open-minded and inspired we do not actually understand the truly insidious nature of defense. We don’t know how much we have been “made to sacrifice” on its account (W-pI.153.5:3), nor what we have done to “sabotage the holy peace of God” (W-pI.153.5:4).

Defensiveness hides our brothers and sisters from us, and forces us into a deadly game of escalating violence that has no winners, only losers.

How do we learn to take the radical step of becoming totally defenseless?

We accept without qualification or condition the lofty function A Course in Miracles assigns us: We are here to save the world (W-pI.153.8:2) – we represent the One Who sent us (T-2.IV.A.18.8:3) – and there is nothing else in our lives but this.

In other words, it is time to accept our function in Creation: to bring love to what is loveless, love to what is fear-filled, and love to what is lost and forsaken and beyond consolation.

Be still a moment, and in silence think how holy is your purpose, how secure you rest, untouchable within its light. God’s ministers have that the truth be with them. Who is holier than they? What defense could possible be needed by the ones who are among the chosen ones of God, by His election and their own as well? (W-pI.153.10:1-3, 6)

If you have come this far in the lessons, then you are not fooling around. You are ready to see the real world, and to remember your rightful place in God’s Creation. All that remains is to become active in the ministry of awakening, which rests upon the simple truth that “you will not see the light, until you offer it to all your brothers” (W-pI.153.11:5).

A Course in Miracles teaches us that we are extensions of love, and that we can only create as we were created, and so all that we can offer is love. We have forgotten this, and live in the world forgetfulness both made and maintains. There is another way. The other way is simply to love you brothers and sisters now. Don’t worry what form this love takes, or whether you are up to it, or what your brother or sisters does or does not do in response to your offer. That is not our concern any longer.

The ministers of God can never fail, because the love and strength and peace that shine from them to all their brothers come from Him. These are his gifts to you. Defenselessness is all you need to give Him in return (W-pI.153.20:4-6).

Thus, we set aside conflict and focus on acceptance. We open our hearts and our minds to our brothers and sisters, bearing witness to the fearlessness that comes from knowing God’s Will and our own are not separate but united as one. We “lay aside what was never real” and “look on Christ and see His sinlessness” (W-pI.153.20:7).

Seek your brother’s innocence. Seek only Christ in him. Withdraw all attack and offer no defense against illusions of powerlessness and hate. In this way, the Peace of God will be restored to our Mind, and flow like a healing river across the fearful, violent world.

←Lesson 152
Lesson 154→

The Eighth Principle of A Course in Miracles

Miracles are healing because they supply a lack; they are performed by those who temporarily have more for those who temporarily have less (T-1.I.8:1).

A Course in Miracles is a wordy project, right? Helen Schucman’s Jesus is nothing if not talkative. But the first chapter of the Text is an exception to that style. There isn’t a lot of excess verbiage in the fifty miracle principles. So it can be especially helpful to give close to attention to the words and phrases used in that section.

In Principle Eight, I want to focus on “supply a lack,” “temporarily” and “those.”

What is the lack to which our first example applies? It applies to faith, which is a foundation of miracle-minded thinking. Miracle-minded thinking is always responsive to our living as bodies in the world. When we are open to miracles, we learn that there is no such thing as separate interests and that our brothers and sisters are our saviors. Miracle workers are faithful because they no longer question oneness. They accept God’s Will as their own. And they know there is no conflict or dysfunction in that unified Will.

Have faith only in this one thing, and it will be sufficient: God wills you be in Heaven, and nothing can keep you from it, or it from you. Your wildest misperceptions, your weird imaginings, your blackest nightmares all mean nothing. They will not prevail against the peace God wills for you (T-13.XI.7:1-3).

The miracle worker has this faith, and therefore knows God’s Peace, which is the foundation of healing – theirs and the world’s, for there is no space between them. To be healed is to heal.

Peace be to you whom is healing offered. And you will learn that peace is given when you accept the healing for yourself (T-27.V.11:1-2).

It is not possible that we need more or less healing than our brothers and sisters. Reality has no degrees or intervals; one either accepts it as it is or does not (T-3.IV.1:5, 8). Yet in the interim before this choice is clear, it does seem that our one problem (belief the separation is real and has real effects) will appear to have many forms, each requiring its own special resolution (e.g., T-27.V.8:1).

The many forms will appear to involve differences that we judge as more or less valuable upon comparison, and we will respond to our evaluation as if it is true. Miracles heal this misperception by accepting it and responding to it, in a way that always leads to clarity that the real world does not include differences.

. . . healing is apparent in specific instances, and generalizes to include them all. This is because they are really the same, despite their different forms (T-27.V.8:6-7).

Thus, it can appear that you or I will temporarily – that is, in time – be calmer and more patient in terms of caring for our brothers or sisters. Or one of us might appear to have a better grasp of A Course in Miracles, or Christian-based nonduality. One of us doesn’t get jealous, another doesn’t get angry. These are illusory differences whose apparent meaning arises because of the faith we mistakenly place in them. Our belief makes it real for us.

Therefore, so long as separation appears real, we need miracles. Miracles accept our apparent differences in order that we might remember that those differences are illusory and point to a world that is not real. It is our belief in that world – our acceptance of it as real – that causes all conflict and suffering.

In other words, “those” is kind of a misnomer because it actually refers to all of us, not this or that segment of us, because we are all subject to the separation and its painful effects. We all believe in differences and in the utility of personal judgment and private discretion as the means to sort out those differences.

But the miracle is hardly so discriminatory. It cheerfully works with us when we’re in the right space space to channel healing for the collective, and it cheerfully bring us into contact with open channels when we’re shut tight with fear. The miracle always cleanses the mind of fear, leaving only a purified example of God’s Love and the freedom and peace that attend that Love.

The eighth miracle principle makes clear that miracles do not discriminate in healing separation-based thinking, because that thinking is in all of us. Miracles are equal opportunity healing agents, neatly bridging the various gaps that appear in our living, until we begin to figure out that the gaps are not real, and therefore can be gently aside without miraculous intervention.

The disappearance of gaps – i.e., boundaries, marks of division – is what peace is. What is one cannot be in conflict – there is no body and no thing with which to disagree. What is one has no other. This may not yet be our lived experience, but we can catch glimpses now and then, as miracles unite us with our brothers and sisters, in ways that transcend our limited understanding of the world.

A Course in Miracles Lesson 152

The power of decision is my own.

The first paragraph of this lesson is in many ways the essence of A Course in Miracles without any softening or spoon-feeding. You’re suffering because you choose to suffer, and you can choose not to suffer. It’s on you, brother. It’s all on you.

We tend to respond in one of two ways. The first is to argue by posing apparently impossibly ethical quandaries – – are you saying that the Jews in Auschwitz “chose” to suffer in that way? That I “chose” to have my dog run over by a car? My son to be diagnosed with cancer?

The second is to simply deny it. Go through our day – and then our life – without ever actually considering the nature of our being and the extent of its creative power.

Let’s take the first response seriously. Let’s go all the way down on the extreme example of the holocaust. Is A Course in Miracles truly suggesting that those who suffer the worst the world has to offer – genocide, rape, starvation, torture – chose it?

If you believe you are a body, and there is an actual world in which that body lives, then the range of experiences open to that body include the worst the world has to offer. You can win the lottery and live happily ever after and you can also be murdered by a serial killer before the sun sets. For most of us, experience won’t reach those extremes but they’re still there. Pretending otherwise is a fool’s errand (T-2.IV.3:10).

All A Course in Miracles does is teach us that there is another way to see the world – at its best, its worst, and the apparent range between them. This seeing teaches us how to perceive with the Vision of Christ, which is a synonym for Love, rather than ego, which is a synonym for fear.

The hallmark of love is radical acceptance – it excludes nothing and noone. It perceives cries for love and extensions of love, and the response to both is the same: love.

If you have the gift of everything, can loss be real? Can be part of peace, or grief of joy? Can fear and sickness enter in a mind where love and perfect holiness abide? Trust must be all-inclusive, if it be the truth at all (W-pI.152.2:3-6).

Therefore, the course gently teaches us that there are no exceptions to love. The holocaust is a vast demonstration of fear, an enormous cry from the heart of the cosmos for love. Most of us are not called to make that cry but we are all called to respond to it – by consoling those who suffer, and showing those who cause the suffering that there is another way.

Is it clear? Right now, the course asks you to perceive only love or the call for love, and to realize that both call forth the same exact response. The secret-which-is-not-a-secret, but which can be hard to remember is: sometimes you are the one crying out, and sometimes you are the one responding, and in both instances, in the end, there is only love.

As God created you, you must remain unchangeable, with transitory states by definition false. And that includes all shifts in feeling, alterations in condition of the body and the mind; in all awareness and in all response (W-pI.152.5:1-2).

Again, this all-inclusiveness is a function of radical acceptance. Exclude nothing and you will remember God’s Love. There will be nothing else to know.

Please note that attempts to understand – which give rise to the challenge inherent in “is the course really saying . . . ” questions – is often not a sincere attempt to learn, but a delay tactic. We understand just fine – it’s application that we don’t want to face. I don’t mind saying it’s good to love one’s enemies, but to actually love those enemies . . . that’s a step too far.

This is why denial of the lesson is the second response, and the one that is actually harder to deal with. We don’t want to be responsible unto love, we can’t actually argue effectively against love, so we just . . . flush it down the memory hole. Forget about it and then forget we forgot about it and go on with our lives.

Lesson 152 is really responding to our habit of denial. It’s saying that to deny our responsibility for love – to hide from it in fear – is actually a form of arrogance. It’s arrogant because it asserts that we can decide what Creation is and what it is not. We are in charge – our will shall call the shots – because God is a cruel and malignant tyrant.

Denial is a very passive-aggressive response to what we fear. The solution – as ACIM would have us practice it – is true humility. Let us accept ourselves as God created us – no more and no less – and then live the life that naturally appears, in which we are gently included as co-creators with God.

Today we practice true humility, abandoning the false pretense by which the ego seeks to prove it arrogant . . . truth is humble in acknowledging its mightiness, its changelessness and its eternal wholeness, all-encompassing, God’s perfect gift to His beloved Son (W-pI.152.9:1-3).

This is true peace. Acceptance – which is the absence of resistance – is the end of conflict. It brings forth the gentle light of creation in which all life is seen equally as a loving reflection of a loving Creator, including our very own self.

. . . we accept of Him that which we are, and humbly recognize the Son of God. To recognize God’s Son implies as well that all self-concepts have been laid aside, and recognized as false (W-pI.152.10:2-3).

Thus, radical acceptance and true humility become the means by which we remember our gentleness and innocence, and our “right to Heaven and release from hell” (W-pI.152.10:5). And as we remember them, we offer them to everyone we meet, everyone we have met or have yet to meet, and even those we will never meet. How else will they remember God? And how else will they teach us to remember God?

This is not an easy lesson, but it is not meant to be. It is meant to challenge us in a deep way, asking us to see our arrogance and violence and let it go in favor of a humble quiet in which we can at last hear the Voice for God, which substitutes peace for anxiety and depression, truth for self-deception and dishonesty with others, and all of Creation for the petty illusion of separation (e.g., W-pI.152.12:3).

←Lesson 151
Lesson 153→

ACIM: The Conditions of Inner Peace

Faith is the condition of inner peace, because it accepts all aspects of experience equally. It trusts God entirely, and allows only the Holy Spirit – not ego – to determine what a given situation or relationship means. To be faithful is to be quiet and still, completely confident that God’s Will is Love, even if that is not instantly or easily clear.

In the world, in a body, faith is simply acceptance without conditions or qualifications. It’s raining on the day we planned a picnic. Faith says, thank you for the rain, what else would you like to do with me today? Faithlessness – which is ego, which is fear – tries to negotiate. It says I don’t like the rain but I’ll deal with it if everyone I invited to the picnic agrees to meet at the diner instead.

When we accept life without placing conditions or qualifications on our acceptance, then we are living – even if only briefly – in what A Course in Miracles calls the holy instant.

The holy instant is the shining example, the clear and unequivocal demonstration of the meaning of every relationship and every situation, seen as a whole. Faith has accepted every aspect of the situation, and faithlessness has not forced any exclusion on it. It is a situation of perfect peace, simply because you have let it be what it is (T-17.VIII.1:4-6).

This is hard, right? The picnic example is kind of silly. What happens when it’s a parent or a spouse dying? What happens when it’s war erupting? What happens when it’s kids starving to death? What kind of cruel sadistic God tells us to accept those difficulties and horrors?

The god projected by fear, that’s who. And we are Creations of the God of Love.

Come back for a moment to the picnic example. We had a picnic planned – delicious salads, sweet iced tea, we invited all our friends. And then it rains. Set your feelings aside for a moment (they matter way less than we think). Do you have the picnic anyway? No. You reschedule it, or move it inside.

In other words, you respond in a calm, rational and helpful way.

So that is what we do as miracle workers when our dearest loves die, when war erupts and kids starve. We respond in a calm, rational and helpful way. It’s not a spiritual crisis. It really isn’t.

The spiritual crisis, so-called, is upstream of the response we make in these bodies in the world. The spiritual crisis is our refusal to accept the situation, which is always because we place our will before God’s Will, and don’t listen to the Holy Spirit.

Thus, the war and the picnic are just symptoms of the same problem, which is our belief in the reality of separation, which manifest as resisting God and trying to arrange and control the details of our lives (and often other people’s lives, too). And there is – because this A Course in Miracles we are talking about – a better way.

Let truth be what it is. Do not intrude upon it, do not attack it, do not interrupt its coming. Let it encompass every situation and bring you peace (T-17.VIII.2:2-4).

Start with something easy. Your morning coffee by the window or the drive to work or whatever. Let it be what it is. Accept it unconditionally. Can you see how everything is perfect? Can you see how you need do nothing?

And can you see how this perfection includes you finishing your coffee? Or getting to work? Or whatever? God does not take anything, but only gives and gives and gives. “You are a miracle, capable of creating in the likeness of your Creator” (T-1.I.24:2).

As we get better at this faith-based acceptance, this living without resistance, this gentle embrace of the holy instant, we scale up. We apply it to the larger so-called problem – war, death, famine and evil. And it works. It heals all of them easily and equally. You know why? Because we are the Christ. There is nothing we cannot love, nothing we cannot accept.

This acceptance is our mission. This is our calling as serious students of A Course in Miracles.

Give as you have received. And demonstrate that you have risen far beyond any situation that could hold you back, and keep you separate from Him Whose Call you answered (T-17.VIII.6:6-7).

Do you see? Our living rises far beyond even the possibility of opposition. And without opponents, there is no conflict, only peace. Therefore, our living becomes peace-filled. Peace is the gift we give because peace is the gift we receive.

From the bottom of my heart: thank you.

Waking up in the Planck Epoch

All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together . . . We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.

~ Max Planck

. . . rejoice that what illusions seemed to separate is one forever in the Mind of God (S-1.in.2:3).

(I sent a newsletter out yesterday – you can sign up here if you like).

Mind, which is abstract, identifies with the body, which is believed to be not abstract but material and thus substantively other than mind. When and as mind does this, it denies that it does this. Then it forgets that it does this. Then it forgets that it forgot and, in this way, ends up believing it is a body. Any suggestion otherwise (there’s only consciousness, et cetera) feels silly, unbelievable.

This identification of mind with body is ancient, deep and entangled. It spirals out into the cosmos; it touches every atom. Body and world, world and universe, are one projection.

When mind believes it is permanently yoked to a body, fear arises. Desire and longing arise. Expectation and judgment, sorrow and happiness arise. These are all forms of suffering! They are all caused by the same illusion, which is that we are separate from – alien unto – Creation. We think we’re bodies but we’re not (W-pI.199.7:8); we think we’re in a world but there is no world (W-pI.132.6:2).

So separation is what we have to address. We have to awaken from the dream of misidentification that is separation. We have to realize we are not bodies and there is no world, and then see what happens. A Course in Miracles provides a framework to do this.

But remember: in truth, nobody awakens. Awakening is not an experience any body has. Even Jesus is just a projection! If you think you’re awakened, you’re kidding yourself. If somebody professes they’re awakened, they’re kidding themselves and you. None of this is a crisis (because none of it is real) but it is a kind of self-generated drama that keeps us from true peace and happiness.

Are we not ready to try something new?

That question is a trap! It’s a trap because whether you say yes or no, you are asserting that awakening takes effort and there’s a you somewhere that gets to decide the effort is worth it, let’s go for it, et cetera. And then you’re right back in the problem you meant to leave behind.

Try to see that there is no free will. Everything is caused by something else. Every belief we hold, every thought we have reflects prior conditioning. We’re just repeating what Mom and Dad said, and when enough of us do this, we call it culture. It’s what brains in bodies do – generate a self that thinks it’s responsible for everything.

This raises an interesting question: what caused our desire to awaken? Deep down you recognize in yourself something beautiful, strong, tender, just and merciful. What caused that? What is this energy that longs to remember itself through you by expressing itself as joy and peace for everyone?

What happens when you ask those questions in a serious and attentive way? What happens when you wait on answers that don’t come from you but from the Holy Spirit?

It’s okay to trust the part of us that wants to awaken. It’s okay to be guided by it. To do what it asks us to do: wear saffron robes, practice the ACIM daily lesson, pray a rosary, cut off a hand and throw it over the monastery wall. This longing to awaken is how God reaches for us; why not reach back?

Yes, I know – “reach back” is nonsense. God is nondual. There is no subject and object in God. There is no sky father with earth kids. There is no separate intelligence using language and concepts to call parts of itself back to itself. God is One.

“God is One.” We think we know what this means! But what is interesting is when we let go of our knowing.

The Planck epoch is an impossible-to-imagine time period a million million million million million million millionths of a second after the Big Bang. In it, our understanding of the laws of physics breaks down. We know the epoch exists but we cannot say what it is. Is not knowing a problem? When we learn that we have no idea what “God is One” means, we also learn that we knew all along. It’s this: this this.