Topic: Lyn’s History with A Course in Miracles; the Course as a radical non-dual teaching.
Archives for 2013
Musings: What is Healing?
“The Holy Spirit speaks to you.
He does not speak to someone else.”
ACIM Text, page 576
Only you can be healed.
You are a mind, not a body and not a brain.
“At no instant does the body exist at all.”
The body is a dream figure in a mind that has not yet awakened from its sleep.
When the mind is healed, love will extend from it to all minds because minds are joined; bodies are not. A Course in Miracles must be learned entirely or not at all because it is an uncompromising teaching in non-duality. It foretells the end of the ego which becomes suspicious and then vicious when it hears any message of non-specific, indivisible love.
Attempts to heal others are avoidance strategies. By focusing on others we escape the only healing there can be– our own. “Others” , or better, the idea of otherness, exists only in the unhealed mind. When it is healed there are no “others”. Beingness is all-inclusive. There is no specialness in being, therefore the ego hates it.
We can’t do love. We can only be love.
When we want to be healed our single purpose makes it possible not only for ourselves but for everyone because minds are joined.
If it is that simple why do we not want to commit to our own healing? Because we are afraid.
And why are we afraid? Because our idea of love is an attack in which we, a separate person, give our own version of love to another or other separate persons. We are not the author of love. We are afraid because we feel guilty for “doing” love on our own terms instead of surrendering to the Love that is our Source. Special love (the ego’s idea of love) brings guilt and guilt demands/expects punishment. The guilt, of course, is denied and buried, but we remain fearful without knowing why.
The answer to love as an attack is in the holy instant where there are no others, because the holy instant is the recognition that you are free of the past, the future, and the body. It is here and only here that you are healed and love is welcomed. In welcoming love you are blessing the world.
Your own healing is all that is required to heal the world of all its suffering.
True healing offers love without attack. You don’t heal or help someone else. You accept it for yourself by coming to this instant and laying aside all questions, longings, wanting, everything you think you know about yourself and others. In the holy instant everything is done for you and you will remember the real world in which there is nothing to fear.
Musings: There Is No Death
“Death is a decision not to decide.”
I was on an interview years back with friends and Course teachers Nouk Sanchez and Tomas Viera, authors of Take Me To Truth. The interviewer was Carrie Triffet author of Long Time No See.
Carrie asked Tomas about his life threatening health challenge and how he was dealing with it. (That’s Tomas in the picture on the right.)
His remarks were those of someone whose vantage point of perception had shifted from within the body to beyond the body. This shift in perception is the reward of practicing forgiveness that A Course in Miracles promises. It’s like lucid dreaming where you are awake in the dream and therefore not affected by it.
What I heard in Tomas’s voice was the absolute conviction of someone that no longer sees the body as his home. It is a rare person indeed that does not care if their body lives or dies. The freedom and peace that he enjoys was absolutely palpable.
The best it gets within the dream is to (fearfully) prolong the body’s life and feel as good as possible until its inevitable end comes. Why don’t more of us ask, “Is this as good as it gets?”
The best evidence that there is a God are these folks, who appear to be living in a body, who see a different world in which there is no fear. Having left the world of sickness, pain, suffering and death, they reside in the deathless zone of the Eternal. Every one of them would tell us that this transformation of mind is available to all of us without exception. Tomas is one of those examples.
Just today on Facebook I read about three very unexpected deaths. The suffering of friends and family is enough to make anyone want to see a different world. First we must believe that it is possible. I invite those who know this place of residence and the new vision that arises within it, to speak out. Let those who suffer know that it does not need to be this way.
Many many years ago, when A Course in Miracles first came into my life, I remember reading, “Death is a decision not to decide.”
I puzzled over that for a long time. It wasn’t until recent years that I fully understood. Death is a decision made in the mind that is ruled by the ego. It is the will of the separated self. It’s not God’s Will. It is a way of preserving our false sense of identity. We seem go out one door (in death), and come back in another (in birth), but we are still simply dreaming of separation.
The mind only changes when a decision is made to place it under the authority of God’s Teacher who shows us there is no death. It is an illusion of suffering that only exists in the mind under the authority of the ego. We must each make that decision to change what rules our mind. Once we do our Eternal nature is revealed and death is forgotten as a possibility.
The Essential Metaphysics of A Course in Miracles
Without understanding the non-dual metaphysics of A Course in Miracles it is impossible to apply the workbook lessons that will change your mind and the way you see the world.
In this series of 4 classes you will learn
- what the course means by “mind training”,
- how to integrate the metaphysics into your life,
- the significance of accepting you are a mind,
- how to use the mind on behalf of awakening.
We will consider the benefits of making this momentous decision and address the fears that arise in the process.
The purpose of offering this class is to present A Course in Miracles as a path to inner peace so that you can decide if it is right one for you.
This is an ideal class for beginners and ongoing students who want to review the metaphysics.
Four Sunday Afternoon Classes
May 26, June 2,23,30
2 to 4 p.m.
In the library
Tuition: $80
To register contact: Lyn Corona via email or 303-880-7713
Location: Rocky Mountain Miracle Center
1939 S. Monroe St.
Denver, CO 80210
Video: Enthusiasts of Kenneth Wapnick & FACIM March 1,2013
A video conversation with Susan Dugan, Lyn Corona and moderator Bruce Rawles about our shared interest in, and appreciation of the brilliant and prodigious work of Dr. Kenneth Wapnick.
Musings: Back Again
I think my last blog post was quite some time ago. Blame it on broken links, many changes in WordPress and a serious lack of technical skills on my part. I recently decided to renovate our SFACIM website with the help of Bruce Rawles, an amazingly skillful webmaster and all around very patient person. What you will find below is also on the About page, but since it is really an introduction and an invitation I wanted to make sure all subscribers to SFACIM received it.
Welcome to School for A Course in Miracles.
I don’t feel that I am overstating my capabilities when I say that I am a learner. Not in the traditional way of accumulating information to gain some advantage, but out of a deep curiosity about what lies beyond a self-centered perspective from which most of us view the world.
I was eleven years old the first time I had an “unusual experience” that gave me my first taste of an alternative point of view. I lived in the country, 14 miles from town, and being an only child I spent a lot of time on my own in nature. This particular time I was engaged in a favorite pastime at which I had developed great skill.
There was a river that ran through our property, and when the water was low enough, the larger rocks were exposed so that I could jump from rock to rock in a steady rhythm, running upstream like a salmon. Only one foot at a time could land on each rock and the game was to go as fast as possible without loosing my balance and dumping into the river. This particular time I suddenly found myself located outside my body in a timeless zone that was perfectly still and peaceful while my physical body kept jumping rocks. I never forgot the experience.
I was a freshman in high school the first time I heard the word enlightenment. I had no idea what it meant, but I caught the scent, like a hound on the trail of something big. The next time I was at the local library I checked out the only two books that seemed somewhat related to the topic. I remember one of the authors was Alan Watts. Nothing I read in those books satisfied my desire to know what enlightenment was. I continued my search off and on for years, knowing someday I would find something that could explain enlightenment and the timeless zone that I knew was more real than anything I had experienced since the river.
It was in the latter part of the 70’s when the A Course in Miracles came into my life. I had just finished reading Jane Robert’s mind-blowing The Nature of Personal Reality which set the stage for the entrance of the Course. I immediately recognized it as the answer to my questions about why I was here, what gives meaning and purpose to life, why I was suffering and how it could end. And also how to get to the timeless zone and stay there forever.
As a beginning student of A Course in Miracles, I developed my own practice of learning. I was living in the mountains about 40 miles west of Denver so I didn’t know there were such things as study groups. As far as I knew the Course was a self study program. The only help available was through asking the inner Teacher to show me the meaning of a lesson or a complicated passage from the text. I would ask and somewhere in the course of my day there would be an incident or an encounter that would give me the understanding. The Teacher became very real for me, always answering in some form I could understand.
I started offering classes, workshops and retreats on the Course in 1986 and with a few brief sabbaticals have continued to do so until this day. Over the years I established several centers for the study of the Course, have been an itinerant teacher traveling the U.S, and most recently joined with some of my colleagues in establishing the School of Reason for students and aspiring teachers of A Course in Miracles. I also began this blog. The point of all our doings, mine or anyone else’s, is that they are curriculums for our learning and vehicles for sharing another way.
The most repeated lesson in A Course in Miracles is “I am not a body. I am free”. Thank God, I can finally say it and know that it is true and not just some fluke that happened on the river one day. We don’t reside in a body and on some level we all know that this is true. That shift, from body to mind, is what A Course in Miracles is all about. It is a shift from a self-centered point of view to a transcendent presence that is mind. It’s a miracle.
It is not only possible to be in the world but not of it; it is essential. Our lives can reflect the ease and freedom of our real residence out of time where we are whole eternal minds in perfect communication with a non-physical universe of spirit comprised only of intangible Love.
The step out of time and into eternity (the timeless zone) calls for humility and the willingness to learn another way. We have to admit that we don’t know how to get there from here. Instead of it happening accidentally, like it did for me on the river, we have the inner Teacher that knows the way, and unlike my early experience that did not last, we can learn to reside there forever.
Here, in this world, is where our transformation takes place. We don’t die to get to Heaven. We just wake up. Enlightenment is not a place to travel to. It is right here. Right now.
The Quiet Center: An Interview with Ken Wapnick – by Susan Dugan
During a visit to The Foundation for A Course in Miracles in Temecula, California to attend a workshop with friend and fellow Course student Deb Shelly, I interviewed premier Course scholar Ken Wapnick, PhD, about his journey with the Course. I wanted to know how Ken perceived his role in communicating the Course’s unique message, how he viewed awakening, how he avoided specialness, how he handled celebrity, and how his application of forgiveness has evolved since his early days with Helen and Bill. His answers may surprise you as much as they did us.
I have never been around an enlightened being–my teenage daughter notwithstanding 🙂 –but must say that sitting in Ken’s presence with Deb felt healing for both of us in ways we found difficult to describe. He offers the gift of his complete, unwavering attention, and seems to listen more deeply and carefully than the hundreds of people I have interviewed over the years. His answers resounded with truth, and led to my decision to publish them in their entirety (except for minor editing and restructuring for flow) rather than weaving truncated quotes into a narrative as I normally do.
NOTE: Clinical Psychologist, Teacher and Author Kenneth Wapnick, PhD, studied A Course in Miracles since 1973, and worked closely with Course Scribe Helen Schucman and Collaborator Bill Thetford in preparing its final manuscript. With his wife, Gloria, he was president and co-founder of The Foundation for A Course in Miracles (FACIM) in Temecula, California. Ken made his transition a few years ago, but his love and teaching legacy are still experienced worldwide by thousands of Course students.
Susan: How do you avoid making your role as a Course teacher special?
Ken: It’s the difference between form and content. A line I always like to quote is where Jesus says “Teach not that I died in vain. Teach rather that I did not die by demonstrating that I live in you.” Teaching is demonstration and what you want to focus on is making yourself as ego-free as possible and then whatever you do will be joyful; whether you’re teaching the Course, being a parent, washing dishes, writing an essay, taking a walk. It doesn’t make any difference.
That’s how you get away from the specialness of the form. Because that’s a real seduction, you know? To think that what I’m doing is important because I’m teaching A Course in Miracles. Well, why is that any different from building a hotel or raising children or anything else? So when you get away from the form, the content will always be the same.
There’s that lovely phrase in the Course about the quiet center. And while the image is not used, it’s implicit in it that if you think of a hub of a wheel there’s that quiet center where you live and the spokes that emanate from it are your various roles: wife, teacher, mother, etc. The spokes are not important. What’s important is that you stay in that quiet center and the love in there infuses everything you do; whether you teach the Course or whether you’re playing with your grandchildren. In a sense it should all be the same and to the extent that you recognize that it’s not the same then you recognize that you still have work to do. That’s where the process comes in.
It’s really a trap when you get seduced by the form into thinking the form is something. You teach Jesus’ message by living it; not by preaching it. I’ve often said you could give a wonderful workshop just reading the phone book and if you read it with love and that love infuses every name you read; then you teach it. It doesn’t matter that you have the theology straight or the dynamics of the ego straight. Anybody can learn it, memorize it. But that’s not how you teach it. That’s not how people learn.
Susan: So it’s about using the things that seem to arise in your life and forgiving yourself when you catch yourself making it special?
Ken: Yes. If you think back to your grade school years what you remember is not the things the teachers taught you. You remember those teachers that were mean and those that were loving; you don’t really remember how they taught you reading, writing, and arithmetic. The teachers who stand out in your mind years later are the teachers who were kind or cruel. That’s what it means to be a teacher–what you demonstrate–whether you’re teaching child-rearing or arithmetic. The line from the text I also quote frequently about the New Year: “Make this year different by making it all the same.” Everything is the same.
Susan: You have a lot of people who want a lot of things from you all the time. How do you deal with that?
Ken: Again, if you really just focus on that quiet center and don’t identify with the spokes. Whether someone says that was a great class or someone says that was terrible or boring or someone asks you the same question over and over again.
I get asked a lot how can you stand to teach the same thing over and over again. People listen to tapes I made 25 years ago and it’s basically the same thing. And I sometimes make a joke; I can say the same thing over and over again because I don’t listen to myself. But really it’s because it’s always for the first time. So if someone makes a “demand,” the person’s just always talking to me for the first time. Otherwise I couldn’t do what I do. It’s all for the first time.
And certainly you don’t take personally what people say. You learn that in grad school in psychotherapy because patients are constantly projecting; they either love you or hate you. Either way it has nothing to do with you. When you become a public figure, the whole trick is to stay in that quiet center. I want to help people to be more happy and peaceful and kinder but it’s not how you define yourself. You define yourself by that quiet center and then whatever people do or don’t do; you just try to be present.
Susan: I’ve read that in the early days of the Course you and Helen and Bill and others would ask for specific guidance from Jesus or the Holy Spirit around bringing the Course into the world, for example. How has your experience asking for help from Jesus or the Holy Spirit shifted over time?
Ken: Well, to be honest Helen and Bill were very used to asking for very specific help; what street corner should we stand on to get a taxi cab, which is no small feat in New York City. And they were very, very good at getting taxi cabs at the height of the rush hour; it could be raining. And I never felt comfortable with that. I could do it, and I would do it but it never seemed quite kosher to me. And as you’ve heard me say; The Song of Prayer pamphlet came out of that. And so I think what has evolved is not so much my understanding but the way I talk about it. It was never anything I did prior to meeting Helen and Bill and it just seemed a way to circumscribe that internal presence.
In that one message I quote a lot Jesus said to Helen you’re trying to make my love more manageable. It was a way of managing him. I used to say a lot instead of worrying about which voice you’re hearing and what the voice should tell you why not ask to hear what you should do to remove the blocks so that you can hear the voice better. So it’s not that asking for specifics is not valid or it can’t help you but in the long run it’s not where you want to go. That will just help you live better in the world. I knew Helen knew better and Helen did know better; it was just part of her costume.
Susan: Did you have any level confusion early on or did it all make sense from the beginning?
Ken: I think it all made sense from the beginning. I remember Helen once asked Jesus why I didn’t have problems with all this and his answer was because there’s no time for it. And actually there wasn’t. I couldn’t have done or do all I do. It was never an issue.
Susan: How has practicing the Course’s unique form of forgiveness changed your life; your relationships?
Ken: Honestly I don’t think it has. I was really never an angry person. I don’t think anything really changed. What the Course did was it gave a specific context for what I was (already) experiencing but it was not really an issue for me. Not that I didn’t make mistakes but I didn’t hold grudges and I was not angry, even as a child. I had some experiences with my parents where I’d get upset, you know; typical adolescence. But it never really went anywhere. I was never one to hold on to disagreement; it didn’t matter.
Susan: Did you experience any undoing? Do you feel that you came into this world in a healed state of mind?
Ken: I had issues, I had problems. I look back on my life and see a difference. But by the time I first saw the Course and read it, it was like I was reading it from the inside. And while I certainly would not have said things the way the Course says them when I read them I understood they were true.
I don’t have a sense of the process (with A Course in Miracles). I think for me the process occurred earlier. My greatest spiritual teacher was Beethoven. I started listening to his music in high school and that was my teacher. I sensed something in his music that over a period of time I was growing into. I was very clear about that from high school, college, graduate school, and beyond. What was more important to me than anything else in my life—my schooling, my work, my first marriage—was getting closer and closer to what I felt was the real heart of his music. It was very clear that was a process of hearing his music over and over and hearing his process.
The ego was gone right at the end of his life; you wouldn’t have known it from his life but you can hear it in the last quartets, especially. So I saw my whole life at that point as a process of growing into that music until I felt one with it. When I first heard it in high school I knew I wasn’t there yet, so that was the journey. So that part of the journey was completed by the time I first saw the Course. After that it was just a kind of crystallizing of everything I knew was true.
Susan: What is it like to basically be peaceful all the time?
Ken: Really nice.
Susan: Is it hard to relate to other people’s stuff?
No, not at all. The first professional work I did that I did enjoy the most was working with disturbed children in the school system. I really enjoyed working with psychotic people. I could enter into their thought system. It was like going into their water but I still had a foot on dry land. I could always relate. I could hear, I could understand, and I could help bring them through and out of it.
It actually makes you much more empathetic and compassionate because no needs are imposing on it. And another thing that’s great–because I am very, very busy–is it helps you become very, very efficient in time because there’s nothing interfering. No conflict. If there’s a pile on my desk, if there are calls to make; I just do it. Often everything happens at once. It makes your life easier. You get so much more done. And it allows you to be more compassionate because you can really hear people’s pain and kind of touch it and try to help without anything interfering.
Susan: I’m still fairly new to the Course and very new to teaching. I feel very joyful and present writing, teaching, or just spending a lot of time with the material. Then something just seems to come up out of nowhere and I feel unloved and unloving. My self-worth plummets and I’m just a mess. Can you speak about what’s going on with the ego’s backlash?
Ken: I think it’s an example of such a common experience almost everyone has regardless of their spiritual path and that is as you become more and more serious about letting your ego go the part of you that identifies with the ego gets terrified. Jesus says when you take my hand on the journey the ego retaliates. He says in that same passage I am beyond the ego so when you take my hand you’re going beyond the ego. So part of you still believes you’re Susan and all the things that go into making Susan, while all of them are not pleasant; they’re comfortable. So it becomes terrifying and that’s when the love turns to hate and the peace turns to fear and you start attacking yourself or attacking others.
It’s very important to understand that and, as you work with this material, to have a healthy respect for the ego which means a healthy respect for your own identification with the ego. Because if you don’t you’ll be blind-sided. Here I am teaching and writing and feeling so kind and loving and boom; I get hit in the back of the neck. And it shouldn’t be a surprise after a while. When it happens you just say oh, that’s what happened, that’s what egos do.
You know, it’s just a book. Books are harmless; it’s nothing. It’s when you take it seriously that you have a problem. You don’t want to dismiss your ego. You want to respect it but you don’t want to give it a power it doesn’t have.
Susan: Some A Course in Miracles teachers present themselves as awakened. Is there an inherent danger in this?
Ken: I think typically people who are truly awakened don’t talk about it. I’m a little suspicious of people who say they’re awakened. I mean, why would you make that claim? You just let your life speak for you. I don’t think Jesus said he was enlightened. That doesn’t mean someone may not be enlightened who says he or she is but as a rule of thumb I think you would tend to not talk about that.
We can lose sight of the process by focusing on being awakened. When people make that claim it really tends to induce specialness and breed separation. Really you just do what you do and behind what you do is that awareness that says we’re all the same. You want to focus on the process otherwise you skip steps.
Susan: What would you say to Course students/teachers who believe they/we can experience peace of mind (in a sense return directly to God/oneness) without practicing the Course’s forgiveness in our relationships?
Ken: When you read the Course it’s obvious it’s a process of hard work and you have to practice and practice and practice. I would be very suspicious of people who claim to be enlightened and people who claim they can just go straight to their right mind. I would say 99.999 percent of the time that’s denial. It’s not that it can’t work once in a while, but unless you’re ego-free you can’t do that and if you’re ego-free you don’t need forgiveness. The Course makes it clear this is a practice and a process. We’re in a world of time. I’m leery of people who say you don’t have to deal with the ego because if you say that you’ve already made it real by saying I’m not going to deal with it.
Susan: People frequently ask you questions about their relationships and problems in their personal lives in these workshops. The Course seems to be leading us to bring those questions to our inner, loving teacher. Is there a danger of students becoming dependent for answers on the external form; on you?
Ken: Obviously it’s a danger. I think what makes it OK is I don’t foster that and I don’t identify with that but I think a certain amount is helpful in the beginning stages just like a child has to begin by depending on his parents. A child’s not going to grow and learn if he or she is not dependent on the parents. But at some point the parents let the child go and you have trouble when parents don’t do that. And I’m certainly aware of all that having done therapy for many years.
People easily will project both good and bad onto me but I would not foster anyone’s dependence. Certainly I would say to some people if I can be of help to you, why don’t you ask me? There’s a line in the Course that says in effect the aim of any teacher is to make himself dispensable. You don’t want people to be dependent on you once they’re able to be on their own. It’s a danger, but I don’t think it’s a problem.
Susan: Do you have to set boundaries with your students? If so; when and how?
There’s no right or wrong. There are times when you really have to place very strict boundaries and times when you just have to give people slack. With some people placing a limit would not be helpful. Other people I do stop. It’s something you have to feel when it’s loving and when it’s not loving. To be firm sometimes is the most loving thing you can do; other times it’s not. It’s the same thing with children. Sometimes you overlook something a child does; other times you need to be very clear. It’s hard to know without feeling it from inside. But if you begin to feel badgered then you should place limits because otherwise you’re dealing with a sense of sacrifice and that’s not helpful. If you can’t freely give; then don’t give.
Susan: So overall your advice to those of starting to teach is to just be that kind and loving presence as much as possible and try to get the ego out of the way so you can hear what would be most helpful to people?
Ken: Yes. There’s a problem, too, with excessive humility. If you have the ability to help people and you don’t exercise it; that’s not helpful. If you have some information or expertise or there’s something about you as a person that could be helpful, to withhold it and say well I’m really just like you are, while true on the level of content, is not true on the level of form. So to withhold an ability to help people would be silly and unkind.
The idea is you don’t identify with it as we were talking about before. That’s the key. You don’t identify with what you do or with what people say about you, you identify with the love that you feel in that quiet center. That’s where you always want to stay and let the spokes lead out from there.
A Course in Miracles Survivor by Susan Dugan
At times it felt like a reality TV program entitled A Course in Miracles Survivor. There were nine of us students on the island to start, plus two facilitators, long-time Course teachers Lyn Corona and Chris Dixon. We joked that the 12th member was Jesus/Holy Spirit/our right mind, and in truth could feel that presence strengthening in us as we did the hard work of looking at the ingenious hurdles our belief in the ego thought system threw our way, fortified by the lifelong work of Ken Wapnick, founder of the Foundation for A Course in Miracles (FACIM).
We had together embraced the first two-year curriculum offered by the School of Reason (SOR) for teachers and aspiring teachers of A Course in Miracles, a program designed to apply Course wisdom in our daily lives, while moving deeply into portions of the Course and related materials most concerned with recognizing and undoing the ego thought system. We “lost” three students along the way. One realized it was not the right time for her, another, a long-time student of both Buddhism and the Course, eventually identified the former as his chosen path. The third discovered he had many more spiritual roads to travel on his way home. The Course does not bill itself as the only return to truth. We bid them a fond farewell, knowing we would meet again in wholeness at the end of the road.
Last week, we “survivors” assembled to celebrate the completion of the beginning of the journey without distance the Course refers to, a metaphorical voyage of awakening from a dualistic dream of separate interests to unity. The Course calls our everyday experience in the dream–our interactions with others, the events and situations that provoke us to attack or defend–our curriculum. It teaches us to use these very challenges to undo our belief in and attraction to individual interests.We are all “teachers of God” when we demonstrate this kind of forgiveness. But we had intentionally taken it a step further by committing to join in our learning and healing, and to share our experience with others.
We spent our first semester studying and listening to Ken Wapnick’s comments on the “What It Says” portion of the Preface and other CDs, examining the early text chapters, and creating and presenting our own diagrams and interpretations of the two thought systems and the creation myth upon which the Course’s teaching relies. Our resistance to “getting it” was strong. The last thing the ego wants us to do is examine the dynamic of sin/guilt/fear it set in motion when it convinced us to believe in the “tiny, mad, idea” of separation from our source.Some of us reported falling asleep during study. Some became visibly confused in class. Some grew defensive. There were times when I experienced all of these states, along with an overwhelming terror of presenting. On many occasions I compared myself unfavorably to other students. On others feelings of unbridled competition reared their ugly heads. I learned to recognize them for what they were—defenses against the truth—and do it anyway.
In between classes I continued to watch my attraction to holding my husband and daughter (what the Course calls our “special relationships”) responsible for my loss of (or return to) peace. Asking—more often pleading—to recognize my projected guilt over an impossible rift and choose again for the part of my mind that remembers our invulnerability.
In our second semester we began preparing and presenting portions of the text and teaching a workbook class for new ACIM students. I begged for help with my fear, did it anyway, and discovered just how heavily supported we really are. “I am so close to you we cannot fail,” Jesus tells us in the introduction to Part II of the Workbook, and reminds us again and again throughout the material. But I had never really heard those words, or allowed the deep comfort they offered in answer to my deep longing, until I started to teach and finally understood that teaching and learning really are exactly the same. I found through presenting to my colleagues and later to new students not only a bridge across my own terror of public speaking but a bridge over the troubled waters of this world back to my right mind. Over time, feelings of competition and comparison, the ego’s story of individual specialness began to weaken. And I began to notice not only the way the ego retaliated following my exploration/presentation on a particular Workbook lesson or Text section, but the way in which I created specific lessons in my life to strengthen my forgiveness practice.
Over our break last summer for example, assigned the Song of Prayer and Psychotherapy
pamphlets and complementary materials on the Course’s teachings around healing, a routine CT-scan discovered a “lesion” on my liver identified months later in a second scan to “confirm stability” as a harmless birthmark. The fear that gripped me during that interval allowed me to deeply delve into my investment in this body/identity and fully experience just how attracted I am to this world of separation from our source and this persona my mind created to keep me here. I realized how much I wanted to make the original error of separation real, and began to learn to truly forgive my investment in specialness. I embraced the truth that I will die, everyone I love will die; that is what body’s do, and began to allow the idea that I am something beyond all this, something vast and whole, impersonal, unalterable, and steadily loving. Something I really want to remember. I don’t have to wait to die to understand this; I can awaken to it now, moment by moment, as I practice with my right mind overlooking what never was, as I begin to really believe that “nothing real can be threatened.”
During the first class of our last semester we set the following intention for the final leg of our journey together in the SOR: “Our scattered goals blend into one intent: we want the peace of God!” Then we embarked on a detailed investigation of the Course sections on “The Laws of Chaos,” and “The Obstacles to Peace.” We spent so much time on the latter that it began to feel like the movie Groundhog Day. For one reason or another I kept being asked to present on the subsection involving “The Attraction of Pain” and the culmination illuminating “The Lifting of the Veil.” During my inquiry of the former I fractured my hip, and saw exactly how I used physical pain to separate from others and reinforce the ego’s sob story of unfair treatment. I was able to see and release that idea almost instantaneously, and found to my astonishment that my husband and daughter appeared loving and helpful during a long recovery that would have launched pre-Course Susan into a meteoric meltdown.
While studying The Lifting of the Veil, in which Jesus explains the collective nature of our return to wholeness, I also began to see how much I want to exclude others from my journey home. I looked closely at the constant ego temptation to congratulate myself on my Course understanding versus what my mind on ego considered the mistaken versions of Course students and teachers who viewed ACIM as a kind of self-help, law-ofattracting, manifesting-your-destiny tool. I learned to catch the ego attempting to hijack the journey, and ask for help in remembering the singular nature of the mind. In the world of perception there is still only one split mind that chooses between the ego’s illusion and the Holy Spirit’s memory of truth, one split mind in need of healing. It is not in my best interests to use ACIM to separate if I want the peace of God.I cannot get home without taking my illusion back to its origin.
Practicing forgiving my belief that my husband and daughter could disturb my peace eventually expanded to include everyone and everything seemingly “out there.” Not always I am sorry to report. Not even most of the time. But more and more. I wanted the peace of God, after all, had committed to my colleagues to find it. Colleagues who also found themselves staring down their own particular demons in their particular curriculum, learning to identify the one problem, and apply the one solution. At some point, bolstered by the loving, forgiving support of comrades equally dedicated to waking up, my desire to return to God outweighed for the first time my desire to hide in the illusion, and I began to notice an increased awareness of the choice available in each moment. I could no longer get away with choosing the ego for very long. It hurt too much, and besides I had begun to actually believe in the idea that we return together or not all.
And so we survivors go on forgiving. We did not want to use the term graduation because the real school, like everything else in our dream of exile from the one love we truly are exists only in our one mind, along with the one teacher we carry with us and can always turn to for clarity. Nevertheless joining together in form to honor our mutual dedication, reflect on our journey to date, and re-strengthen our commitment feels right.
As we met last week Lyn and Chris transformed a corner of Lyn’s apartment building penthouse into an elegant dining oasis complete with crisp linens, fine crystal and cutlery, and clusters of lilies. Flowers symbolic of the peace always available to us when we turn away from the ego’sendless boasts and gripes and meet in stillness with our inner teacher to smile gently at our error and allow our truth. To my mighty companions in forgiveness in the SOR, the survivors and those who decided to heal their minds elsewhere, and to everyone everywhere longing for unity I raise a toast of appreciation and a hand to grasp. We return together regardless of how the details of our maps vary. Thank you again for your growing willingness to open your eyes despite your fear, to take our teacher’s hand, and to continue to find our innocence together.