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.

The End of Fearing God and Love

True kindness has no fear in it. It wants nothing from the other because it knows the other is its own self. There is no compromise in kindness, no negotiation. It knows what is true. And because what is true is not separate from it, it is kind.

If I feel fear, then I cannot be kind. If I perceive differences, then I am fear-filled, regardless of whether I describe my feelings that way or not. Perception of differences drives a way of thinking that produces fear and fear does not question the appearance of differences. It just defends itself.

So we need to get a handle on fear, not kindness. Kindness is easy; kindness is what we are. But fear stops us from practicing kindness. It stops us from extending what we are.

We are fearful because we believe we are guilty. The guilty expect punishment because they believe they deserve punishment. The guilty wait on death. Their whole life is death row. They cannot be anything but fearful.

Therefore, in order to end fear, we need to recognize and accept our guiltlessness. We need to realize that our innocence is established in Creation, and is a fact of life that includes all life, not just “Sean” or “Cheryl” or whatever.

The reason this is not perfectly clear to us right now is because we have forgotten what it means to be one with God. We like parts of our life just fine – the dog, walks on the beach at dusk, coffee with friends. And we think that by joining with our brothers and sisters in God – a joining in which differences lose their value – then we will lose all those things.

We do not trust God. We do not trust Love.

We are attached and invested in this life, and when it is threatened – by rain, by a stranger or by the Love of God – we defend it. We’re like the one who says they’ll follow Jesus right after they bury their father. It’s no skin off Jesus’s back – it’s not a crime against God or Nature. But there is a better way, and the better way is to say “yes, Lord,” drop everything and follow.

For you and me, as nondual-minded Christians studying A Course in Miracles, this means letting go of differences. Which really really means letting go of their value. Notice when you are valuing differences and just stop.

If it sounds too hard then you haven’t tried because when you actually try it you realize it’s not hard at all – it’s impossible.

That’s why we need a spiritual practice like A Course in Miracles. That’s why we have to chill out about ascended masters and awakening and all that and just, you now, follow Jesus.

This is not a spiritual accomplishment, the fruits of which await us in the future. Disciples are disciples now. Fear of God and Love is a habit we can break today. It is a joy we can feel right now.

Let the dead bury the dead, said Jesus. He means that we don’t actually live in the world. Life is not in differences – like bodies that are dead vs. bodies that are alive. Life cannot be judged because it is one-without-another. Its value is not set by us.

Life is kind. It will take nothing from us. It will only give us what we already know is ours in Creation. It does nothing but make what is true clear: we remain as God created us, and our long suffrance believing otherwise is over.

The Fifth Principle of A Course in Miracles

Miracles are habits, and should be involuntary. They should not be under conscious control. Consciously selected miracles can be misguided (T-1.I.5:1-3).

Since miracles are expressions of Love, which does not admit distinctions, they are not personal. Any attempt to make them into a thing that we do or that somebody else does reinforces the very confusion in identity that miracles are given to correct. The miracle is a way of being in the world with all our brothers and sisters that is premised on service, which is an action coming from love that seeks only to reestablish our sameness, which reflects our underlying equality which – in the world – is a living symbol of oneness.

Thus, miracles have no “goals” other than reestablishing our identity in and as extensions of Love. When we commandeer them for our own interests – to win the lottery, rehab our spouse into a more ideal partner, write the perfect poem, whatever – we obscure their healing potential because in truth we have no personal interests. We have no needs. Only ego subscribes to the illusion of needs; therefore, only ego could need a miracle to be personal.

Here is what A Course in Miracles has to say about our habit of taking everything personally (which always produces goals for us, in which someone has to lose or sacrifice, rather than shared goals for all, in which nobody loses and everybody gains).

Another way of describing the goals you now perceive is to say that they are all concerned with “personal” interests. Since you have no personal interests, your goals are really concerned with nothing. In cherishing them, therefore, you have no goals at all. And thus you do not know what anything is for (W-pI.25.3:1-4).

Choice and decision – or any form of conscious direction – have no place in the application of miracles. Miracles are natural and involuntary, like sneezing or blinking. We don’t resolve to do these things; they simply happen. We don’t study or practice them. Indeed, we barely notice them.

Can we see the miracle in a similar light?

The fifth miracle principle suggests that the extension – which includes the reception – of miracles should be exactly that habitual. When we forget the body and its illusion of separate interests and simply adhere to Love’s non-dramatic nudges, then miracles are the natural result. And they always facilitate a condition in which additional miracle-minded thinking becomes more fluid and effective. Everybody wins and nobody loses. There are no separate interests. The miracle both reveals and reinforces this understanding.

In a sense, this principle recognizes the ego’s objective of making everything about itself. Ego loves the idea of miracles so long as they reinforce the separation from God upon which its existence depends. Ego recognizes scarcity – whether it takes the form of relationships that treat us poorly or the inability to find a parking space – and is happy to apply miracles as potential “solutions” to those problems. Many Course students cling to this conception of miracles, however subtly, for a long time.

But miracles are not given to amend or improve upon the ego’s illusory world. They may appear to have affects there (and they may not) but improving on illusions is not their function. They are not given to solve our so-called problems. They are given to make clear the impossibility of separate interests and in that way to unite us more surely with our brothers and sisters in love.

Thus, when we consciously choose the circumstances under which we want to give or receive a miracle, the risk (perhaps even the likelihood) is that we are heeding ego rather than spirit. We are almost certainly overthinking the situation. And remember: ego is happy to be subtle. It has no aversion to our being “spiritual” so long as the fundamental goals of the spiritual practice do not threaten its existence.

Expressions of love are natural. They don’t need to be forced. They don’t need to be found, taken hold of, and then applied. They aren’t “chosen.” Or rather, they were already chosen, but by God in Creation, and for all of God’s children (broadly defined to include snails, quasars and ravens). Miracles mean life, not death. They mean possibility and inclusion, not exclusion and limitation. They are co-creations, not singular constructions.

All any miracle can do is remind us over and over that we remain as God created us, are capable only of extending love, and – as an effect of the first conditions – are worthy of receiving nothing less.

Review Period IV: ACIM Workbook

A Course in Miracles is about application – it is meant to be lived. In these bodies, in this world, we learn that we are not bodies and there is no world. The paradox is not something we solve intellectually. It is more like an optical illusion that we suddenly “get.”

In this review, the course prepares us for application by retroactively applying a theme to the previous twenty lessons: “My mind holds only what I think with God” (r-IV.In.2:2).

Most of us read that and think it means that our minds are going to be cleansed or purified. We think that the egoic self is going to be purged of its bad qualities while holding onto its good ones. In other words, we’re going to have our cake and eat it, too.

But, in fact, this statement about our mind is a statement about what our mind is in truth: and it is not the mind which holds the ego’s lies – both the ones that please us and the ones that displease us. It is another level, one that from our separated perspective, we cannot see. We can barely imagine it.

Guilt stops us from realizing the mind we share with God, and from bringing its creative powers into application. Therefore, we need forgiveness – we need the correction of the underlying error (which is our belief in separation) to be undone for us.

The way that our errors are corrected is that we look at them without flinching. We realize that all illusions are “defenses that protect your unforgiving thoughts from being seen and recognized” (r-IV.In.3:2). The whole purpose of illusions is to “hold correction off through self-deception made to take its place” (r-IV.In.3:3).

Salvation begins with our willingness to see this as true. We don’t have to believe it! We simply have to recognize how our way has not worked and so – Bill Thetford-like – we declare there must be another and – Helen Schucman-like – agree to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in finding it.

Your self-deception cannot take the place of truth. No more than can a child who throws a stick int othe ocean cange the coming and going of the tides, the warming of the water by the sun, the silver of the moon on it by night (r-IV.In.4:2-3).

What is true is true: it cannot be made false by wishful thinking. No more can what is false be made true. Our minds hold only what we think with God – are we not curious to find out just what this means?

This review period is designed somewhat differently than those that went before. Before we were reviewing ideas, looking at them in slightly different lights, reinforcing core ACIM concepts. Now we are creating a space in which actual communion with God is possible, each day bringing “the message of His Love to you, returning messages of yours to Him” (r-IV.In.4:2-3).

This communion is more important than being “right” about a given lesson. It is communion that assures us we are on the correct path, that we are not being led astray by the Holy Spirit, and that Jesus remains an elder brother carefully attending our awakening. Our day arranges itself around our devotion to the course and to the awakening it promises. Do we welcome this?

In this review period, sparse as it may appear at first glance, we take real steps into the world as forgiven children of a loving God whose only desire is that all Creation know His Peace and Joy. These are not idle promises! They are not just words.

God offers thanks to you who practice thus the keeping of His Word. And as you give your mid to the ideas for the day again before you sleep, His gratitude surrounds you in the peace wherein He wills you be forever, and learning now to claim against as your inheritance (r-IV.In.10:1-2).

For the next ten days, let us make it so together. Our minds hold only what we think with God – can happiness and peace not be our truth? Can it not become our gift to the world?