School for A Course In Miracles

"The universe of learning will open up before you."

School for A Course In Miracles

“The universe of learning will open up before you in all its gracious simplicity.” T-14. II. 6:4
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Musings: Your Way Will Be Different… Out of the comfort zone. Help is available.

“If you want to be like me, I will help you, knowing we are alike. If you want to be different I will wait until you change your mind.” – Jesus, A Course in Miracles Text, page 145

You may not be willing yet to be shown another way because you are not so sure it offers more than what you’ve got. Rather than set sail into unknown territory, almost everyone agrees to the lie of separation and specialness. To walk out of the dream would be like turning your back on the tribe. You may be considered a traitor.

In this post I want to let you know that,  a. stepping out of your comfort zone is not easy, and b. help is available.

I have become convinced of a few things on this journey and from time to time I will pass these on to you in the hopes of saving you time and unnecessary suffering.  Here is the first time saver:

You need a teacher to help you navigate this transformation. This teacher will act as a guide and a comforter, showing you how to distinguish truth from illusion, pleasure from pain, and loving you more than you presently love yourself. Because you don’t love yourself you cannot help yourself.

You need a teacher to motivate you to wake up. Only one who knows what is on the other side of the dream could promise that waking offers you everything and mean it.

Without a teacher to show you how to train your mind you would stay on the battlefield, defend the little that you have, and die in the process. The teaching  of A Course in Miracles offers you resurrection, not death.

You need a teacher to show the cost to you of your choice to remain separate. You can’t see what you are doing because you believe it is reality.

You don’t know the way out of your self-inflicted suffering. But you can be shown by one who went beyond it and who offers to talk you through your own resurrection. In A Course in Miracles Jesus offers us his education and companionship in overcoming the world. Who better to teach us the resurrection of our mind than the one who accomplished it? By listening to what he has to say you can perhaps become a willing and coachable learner.

It is my pleasure to point you to the one who said, “If you want to be like me, I will help you, knowing we are alike. If you want to be different, I will wait until you change your mind.”

Now that statement is certainty, is it not?

That certainty is yours if you would learn how to join with the mind that could say such a thing. If you can, think of Jesus as a symbol of  love-without-opposite  in your right mind, and not what unhealed minds have made of him. That he died while suffering for our sins is a tragic misperception of a brother who only tried to teach us that we are loving and lovable by demonstrating it himself.

Musings : “I need devoted teachers…”

jesus-knocking-door
“I need devoted teachers who share my aim of healing the mind.”

 

 

A Course in Miracles is about healing the mind and nothing else.

In the Manual for Teachers, Question #9, “Are changes required in the life situations of God’s teachers?”, Jesus replies: “Changes are required in the minds of God’s teachers.” The emphasis on the word minds is Jesus’, not mine.

The confusion of the mind with the brain is an error made by even the brightest scholars throughout history to include present day. It has taken the mind of Jesus– a mind that is free of illusions– to teach us the distinction between mind and brain so that we can avail ourselves of a power that will change our destiny from one that always ends in death to one of resurrection of the mind and eternal life.

Life is in the mind, and only the mind. There is no world and there are no bodies! They only appear as real to us by our desire to see them. If we are willing to learn they are imagined we would never be affected by either of them.

This may seem an impossible task and yet Jesus assures us that it is not only possible but that it is simple. The difficulty lies only in our resistance. In spite of our enormous suffering, we want to be right about who, what, and where we think we are. 

We think we are children of the ego, the home of “evil, darkness and sin”. We think we are bodies, born of other bodies. And we think we live in a world that can affect us positively or negatively.

Early on in our School for A Course in Miracles classes it became obvious that even longtime students did not know that they had a mind, let alone how to change it. How then, could they possibly do Jesus’ Course and experience the benefits of returning their minds to the Teacher for truth. Not only that, but how could they fulfill the function that made them the one teacher needed to save the world?

It seemed to us that the first order of business for our school was to offer a course in which students learned the importance of the mind, that they had one, how to access it, and how to change it. That course is the Course Immersion. It makes teachers of God out of its students.  “A teacher of God is anyone who chooses to be one. His qualifications consist solely in this: somehow, somewhere he has made a deliberate choice in which he did not see his interests as apart from someone else’s”. M. 1. 1:1-2.

On January 13, 2016, a group of earnest students, guided by Jesus and his Course along with scholar Kenneth Wapnick and devoted teachers and mentors of the School for A Course in Miracles, began together a six month immersion in the study and application of the Course. This was the 4th Immersion offered since the founding of the school in 2007. To date we have shepherded 20 students through the program.

The Course Immersion is an intimate accelerated learning opportunity for a small number of earnest students. Our curriculum emphasizes that students, teachers and mentors make the journey together. We are all learning the same lesson– “God’s Son is guiltless” — and we all share the same Teacher of forgiveness. Perhaps the teacher has become less resistant to changing his mind and can stand as an example of humility and the benefits of becoming a happy learner. In the end the teacher and student learn they are the same.

Mentorship is a unique aspect of the CI program. Each student is given a mentor to support him in the right-minded use of the classrooms life presents him with. In this mutually beneficial relationship, mentor and student experience the shared purpose that gives meaning to all relationships.

What are the benefits of the Course Immersion?

Your feet will be set firmly on the gentle path of forgiveness that leads to God, and nowhere else.

You will learn your lessons in the company of students, mentors, helpers and teachers who share the same yearning to learn another way of being in the world that benefits all beings.

Finally, you will learn that reality is a shared experience that exists in the minds of those who share the same thought system of healing and forgiveness and listen to the same Teacher. It is a community of love.

If you feel called to participate in the upcoming Course Immersion in January 2018, or would like more information please click here.