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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There Is No Peace Except the Peace of God

Inviting path“There is no peace except the peace of God, unless you seek for misery and pain.”

 Lesson 200

The lessons of A Course in Miracles are a song that comes from the heart of Love to the heart of one that sleeps.

They are meant just for you its reader and no one else, as intimate as you will allow them to be. They undo suffering at its cause: your mistake-in-identity.

You are a dreamer and this is your dream of separation. You have dreamed everything in your dream and you can continue to dream and stay asleep. Or you can choose to wake up by inviting the lessons of the Course into your dream to help you look at it and learn to see it from the perspective of wholeness.

Undoing the belief in a separate self with a private will is the inevitable outcome of setting foot on this path of liberation. Along the way false beliefs will be undone, trials and tribulations gone beyond, and glorious things learned as we pass from conflict, through peace to oneness.

Oneness is love.

I love what the Course has taught me and I think I can help others learn from it as well. This is a passage that we make together by sharing what we are learning so that conviction will be strengthened in everyone. It is a way of opening our eyes, ears, and mind to the possibility of living without fear.

Waking is not religious or even spiritual.

Waking to Oneness is truth.

It’s simply what is.

There are many lessons in A Course in Miracles that have altered my point of view so radically that the world never appeared the same after that. It was if something left me that was never there in the first place. I couldn’t tell you what it was because it is gone. Call it illusion, falsity, pretense, effort: whatever it was, its going left space in which something new and surprising could occur, not as a one-time event but as an on-going mystery unfolding.

I thought it might be helpful to others to share parts of those lessons and my perspective on them. This is one of those lessons.

Lesson 200—There is no peace accept the peace of God.

“There is nothing else for you to find except the peace of God, unless you seek for misery and pain.”

That is a pretty unequivocal statement. There is nothing else for you to find except the peace of God. That is, unless you seek for misery and pain. The peace of God or misery and pain, take your pick. Those are the only options.

 It is understandable if you want to argue with that statement given the investment you might have in your dream.  Arrogance is the first and perhaps only real obstacle to becoming a learner of another way, entirely unknown to you. We want to be right about what we think reality is in spite of the fact that it is causing us misery and pain and always ends in death. Wouldn’t you be better off if you were wrong, aside from the fact that you are wrong? (I didn’t say those famous last words. Jesus did.)

Lesson 200 makes perfectly clear what the choice is. A real choice doesn’t have an alternative. It ends choosing altogether, returning the mind to what you really want: peace.

Here is where the ego, that false sense of personal identity, loudly begins to resist. You know its sound and the feelings that arise when defense feels necessary to protect the little that you have and think you know. It says things like,”Peace sounds boring, don’t you think?” “I want a lot of other things AND peace. Let’s make a deal.”

The personal point of view tells us that it would be a sacrifice to let go of “conflicting goals, senseless journeys, frantic vain pursuits, and meaningless endeavors” and to want the only thing that can be found.

There is another voice. It is silent and yet it knows the way back to peace with perfect certainty. The truth is already within us but we are in perpetual conflict because we hear two opposing voices and we have to choose only one.

You are the chooser of which voice to listen to, which calling to obey. You are the one who is humble and willing to trust in a better way than the direction you are currently going. Lesson 200 is written to you. In fact, all the lessons are.

No ego would ever choose the peace of God because it does not contain the “gift” of specialness that the ego seeks. Peace cannot be possessed by anyone so it has little appeal to the individual. No one else will even know if your mind is changed and you have found the peace of God.

(Note: One of the things that most students of the Course overlook is that the lessons do not give the personal “you” anything. To the ego the lessons are either a waste of time or they require  romanticizing so that the ego can delude itself in thinking it is getting somewhere or something with the lessons.

It is actually the seeker (ego) itself that gets undone in the lessons of the Course. The seeker wants  peace as a possession for itself so it approaches the lessons as a way to acquire what it thinks it is missing. Undoing the seeker reveals the peace that has always been.

So let’s be clear that the lessons undo. They may sound poetic to a personal self that can turn anything into a tune to its glory but if you actually open to the lesson you will see it is presenting you with the opportunity to look at the arrogance of the ego so that it can be seen for what it is and forgiven.)

“Forgive yourself for vain imaginings, and seek no longer what you cannot find. For what could be more foolish than to seek, and seek and seek again for hell, when you have but to look with open eyes (not from the self centered point of view*) to find that Heaven lies before you, through a door that opens easily to welcome you?”

All you need do is look upon the you that seeks in all the wrong places and for all the wrong things and see that it has never brought you peace. These are all vain imaginings of a separate self, arrogant in its attempts to make itself better than other men and always failing in the end because no matter how good the dream,  it always ends in death.

Peace belongs to you, the chooser of peace, the non-locatable presence that has been released from misidentification with a body. What chooses the peace of God already has and is the peace of God. (This is so simple and yet it is so difficult to speak about because the words aren’t it. They point; that’s all).

Now here comes the practical application of learning that there is nothing to find here except peace. Give it! Since you can’t get anything, because there is no seeker who lacks anything, you can only give. In giving without exception you teach yourself what you truly are.

 “It is given you to find the means whereby the world no longer seems to be a prison house for anyone.”

“Freedom is given you where you beheld but chains and iron doors. But you must change your mind about the purpose of the world, if you would find escape.”

Here it is: plain and simple. (Nobody wants to hear this).

“You must change your mind about the purpose of the world.”

For most, the world is a prison house and we are its victim. It gives to take away. We lose the things we love. We are born, struggle a while, get old and sick and die.

For others, the world is their playground, filled with the idols to their specialness. Their hope is that these “special deities” will give them more than others so they feel successful.

Neither purpose, prison house or playground, will show you that you are free.

Here’s what will.

“You will be bound till all the world is seen by you as blessed, and everyone made free of your mistakes and honored as he is. You made him not; no more yourself. And as you free the one, the other is accepted as he is.”

Here is the way to peace, the bridge to eternity. This is your purpose and your function while you abide where you are not at home. The key here is “all” and “everyone”. Make no exceptions. It is not the people we love that are the problem. It is the ones we don’t love, the ones we blame for our unhappiness, that hold the key to our freedom. They are innocent in eternity as are you, outside of which we are nowhere.

 “Who could hope for more, while there still appears to be a choice to make between success and failure; love and fear?”

An Invitation

Have you ever wanted to seriously immerse yourself in A Course in Miracles because you know that your peace lies in understanding and applying what it says?

Have you ever wanted to see the real world that the Course promises and you just don’t quite understand it’s method for getting you there?

Do you feel called to be truly helpful and are not quite sure what that means?

Well, this might be your time to make the leap, and to accept this invitation.

The School of Reason is for serious students of A Course in Miracles. By serious I mean earnest, as in ready to look right at the problem that you have, that I have, that we all have, and learn a better way.

The School of Reason offers a year long immersion in the study and application of the principles and practices of A Course in Miracles.

I am inviting you to attend an Open House and Orientation to the Course Immersion Program on Monday, August 16. It will give you the necessary information and answer your questions so you can make an informed decision as to whether this program has your name on it. (Click here for information)

I hope you will consider attending because I believe in the value of this Immersion to educate you in the material and make sure you know how to apply it in your relationships and in the circumstances that life presents.

I hope to see you at the Rocky Mountain Miracle Center (RMMC) on Monday, August 16, 2010 at 7 p.m.

If you are not able to attend and remain interested in the program, please contact me to schedule a time to talk about the possibilities for you.

In all your doings, be blessed,

Lyn Corona, Director, School for A Course in Miracles

 

Musings: Who Is Looking?

water dripWhat would you be willing to give to absolutely know, without a shadow of a doubt, that a happy outcome to all things is sure? That there is nothing to fear? That there is no need to feel loss, pain, or suffering? That there is no death? This knowledge is your inheritance. It has already been given you.

All that stands in the way of knowledge are illusions, believed to be true. The problem, as the quote from the great sage Nisargadatta points out, is solely mental—in the mind. There are no real problems.

 

 

“It is all the mind can do—

Discover the unreal as unreal.

The problem is only mental.

Abandon false ideas, that is all.

There is no need of true ideas.

There aren’t any.” –Nisargadatta Maharaj

The miracle shows you that illusions are illusions; that the false is false; that the unreal is unreal. This all you need learn to let all fear fall away.

Seeing the false as false may not sound very glamorous if your idea of awakening is that it happens to “some one”.  I mean, seeing illusions as illusions! Come on! What’s fun about that?

Seeing illusions as illusions cannot be done by a body at all. That’s what’s amazing about that!

The shift from seeing through the body’s eyes to seeing through the impersonal eye of one Self is a miracle. It is a leap from physical identity to mind (not to be confused with intellect)  within Mind.  It requires vision and vision is a gift. A body cannot give it because the body does not possess it. Vision is given. Would you first attempt to give yourself a miracle and then ask for one?

“God is my strength. Vision is His gift.”  Lesson 42

The miracle is a shift out of the body identity and into the one Mind. It is a shift in looking through a different set of eyes: not physical eyes but spiritual eyes. It is a different way of seeing. The who in who is looking is no longer personal. It is not a someone.

While the body’s eyes can only see illusions, spirit can only see what is.  The body’s sensory apparatus was made exclusively to validate the existence of the illusory person.

(Note to you, the reader: I am writing about something here that can only be recognized and known. That must be understood. Perhaps, you can be set up for vision to dawn. I am not sure. So this instrument seems to be doing this, in service to that. The process goes something like this. Thoughts come. There is silence. An image comes. There is emptiness. There is a mind in service to That Mind and then there is Mind Only and Silence presides over everything. There is no lyn. She materializes when there is a story.)

Most of us think we are earnest spiritual seekers until we realize it means letting go of our stories about ourselves right up to this very one we are in right now. The story and the lyn character are the illusion, the dream of separation. That’s what we need to look at in a different way, through different eyes. We need to learn how to look at the dream from an impersonal point of perception.

You can’t have both the dream and waking up.  Most want both. Your problem is that you like some parts of the dream and not other parts. A dream is a dream. Choices within the dream are meaningless because they lead no where. Dreaming or waking? That’s the only choice.  Which will it be? You cannot be forced. It is the one choice you have in this world. All other choices are choices for the unreal.

“Where are dreams but in a mind asleep?”   ACIM

The “undoing of what never was” (personhood, individuality, separation, specialness) is personally insulting to an ego. After all it tells us who we are, what’s important, where to go and what to do. And now it is being called into question. What’s goin on?

If you will look earnestly you will find you are frequently working and reworking the story of yourself:  that self-made (synthetic) individual that you have accepted to be what you are. Over and over you piece together a story of a life in a body in order to convince yourself and others that your personhood is real….that you exist!

“Nothing that can be visualized or imagined is real.”

Prior to the undoing, relationships can’t be anything but self-serving. We use others to maintain the story about ourselves, whatever that may be.  After undoing there is no “other” to love or to hate. Love is inclusive; it is not “two who have become one”. It is “not-two”, period. There never were two.

As you become happier about learning what you really are you  lose interest in the dream figure and all the related stories that feed it and keep it alive.  Personhood starts to dissolve, to recede, and the freedom that becomes apparent following its dissolution bring companions of joy,  peace and impersonal and indiscriminate Love. The belief that it is a sacrifice to let personhood fall away is based upon the assumption that the separated self actually existed in the first place.

What happens to the dream figure, when we cease making it? It is recognized to be the empty vessel that it is. Neutral. There is nothing in it. There is no body home! We never were located in the body in the first place. The separation never occurred.

What remains is genuine stillness.  Nothing is left of “me”; stillness is. Now we understand the meaning to Jesus’s directive to “Be Still and Know.” Be still from the constant assertions of making a self. When that ceases there is “no thing” separating What Is from What Is.

Note: I know this sounds like the ravings on a Dr. Bronner’s label. This is the dilemma of trying to put into words what can’t be spoken of.

“To be your self is to be no self at all.”

What of the character that continues to appear in the dream?  Has it any use at all?

All gifts are  given through the mind that is immersed in Mind,  known as the “Christ Mind”.  It has vision, the alternative to judgement and separation. Christ’s vision is a gift given to all, without exception. It reflects the indiscriminate love of our Creator. Healing, forgiveness, and blessing (they all mean the same thing) extend without any awareness of someone doing something. This is a constant outpouring of love. Meanwhile the body carries on with the details of living in the world without angst or effort.

“Nothing of lasting value can happen to someone who knows exactly what they want.”   Nisargadatta

The most perfect Stradivarius violin needs a player for it to make beautiful sound. Likewise, the body instrument in the hands of  The Maestro functions flawlessly. Used by the ego it will gather information for its stories. Bla, bla, bla, bla, bla.. The instrument itself is empty and filled with Silence. Its potential is fulfilled only when it is played by One Who knows what it is for and how to play it. When The Maestro plays there is a different world to see.  Fear cannot be found. It is no where present.

A  problem arises only when there appears to be a doer: some (separate) one who can take credit or blame. It is this that we attempt to do when we believe we have a life and a will of our own. A Course in Miracles refers to this as the authority problem.

Musings: The Myth of “Personhood”

The  problem with being human is that everything seems to be personal when it is not.

Suffering is the result of the personal self interpreting things in terms of itself: if it benefits “me”, it’s good; if it doesn’t benefit “me” it’s bad.

To the non-locatable Self, nothing is wrong; everything is as it is– no problem. Thoughts are just thoughts. Feelings are just feelings. Sensations are just sensations. They don’t belong to anyone. They are simply present without the interpreting mechanisms of the separate self. Just as the sky would not complain about clouds that appear in it, the Self cannot personalize nor object to what is still part of itself.

Miracles gradually shift our awareness from the body, that locatable, personal sense of a “me”,  to spirit, that impersonal awareness that is Self. It is a gradual process so as not to arouse too much fear in the ego, causing it to turn suspicious and vicious. We are told early on in the text of A Course in Miracles that we will not be “hurled into reality.”

“Miracles transcend the body. They are sudden shifts into invisibility, away from the bodily level. That is why they heal.” – Miracle principle 17.

The belief that it is a sacrifice to give up the personal is based upon the belief that the personal actually exists. In fact, personhood is a mind-constructed fabrication of a separate self in relationship with other separate selves. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing is given up; there is only an illusion of giving up. The personal self never existed.

In writing about this I hope that some of the resistance to engaging in the lessons of the Course will be recognized, understood, and not made a big deal of. Perhaps you might even welcome the shift from the personal reference point to an all-encompassing awareness of what is. Instead of either pathologizing this shift or making it a special experience that belongs to a “someone” you may see this as natural, effortless, and available equally to everyone. This could be very helpful.

Relationships for a non-personal purpose are particularly confounding to the ego to which everything is “useful” for the purpose of validating the existence of personhood. “Me”, “I”, and “mine” make total sense to it. From the point of view of a separate self, love is the fulfillment of a longing to merge with another separate self.

Intimacy is the natural state of all relationships when the sense of a personal self is no longer believed. The non-locatable, impersonal Self recognizes itself everywhere in everything. Every encounter is a meeting with one Self directly, without any of the interference of personal interpretation. This is intimacy. It is devoid of the specialness that a personal point of view gives to everything.

To discover that joy and love are not personal and never did belong to someone is an extraordinarily liberating awareness. There is nothing to be gotten from anyone. Everything we could ever hope to find is already available. Clinging to our self-constructed sense of separateness that perceives through the body’s senses is all that keeps us from freedom. We cling because, in believing what we have made of ourselves, we also believe it would be a huge sacrifice to give it up. Again, nothing is given up. It is all smoke and mirrors.

Usually a question arises about being able to function without having a personal point of reference. The ego tells us that we will run amuck without its “guidance”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Life continues just as before only awareness of life is not through the sense organs of the body including the brain which interprets everything in a personal way.

Awareness is non-locatable and impersonal. It is. Everything gets done, only without the sense of a personal doer. The understanding that there never has been a personal doer does not suddenly interfere with functioning; it liberates functioning. The body proceeds  without personal involvement. It is an enormous relief from the burden of credit and blame that the ego placed upon everything.

For most of us the falling away of the false personal self is a gradual process. Each lesson of A Course in Miracles, applied to situations in our life, will chip away at our belief in a separate self without arousing too much fear in the ego. Of course, sometimes it happens that the ego does become suspicious then vicious, counseling us to abandon the lessons and their skillful undoing entirely. It is my hope that those who come to Becoming Learners Together (now School for A Course in Miracles) will come to understand that there is nothing to fear in awakening from the dream of separateness.

If you only knew the power of the miracle to free you you would want to offer them. You can learn how. Right here. They can be applied to whatever your circumstances are, no matter where you find yourself, no matter what your history is. The only requirement is to want to learn another way of perceiving. Think of it as a science project if that is your interest. “Humans find another means of perceiving that shows there is another world!!!!”

Or think of it as the greatest love story ever told. “Woman finds her beloved and He gives her the universe.”

Is not the end of seeking and the finding of a treasure beyond your most pleasurable and satisfying imaginings a worthwhile endeavor?

Is not finding the never ending supply of love that can be given without measure a worthy function?

This is an invitation to learn how to work miracles. The only qualification is the willingness to see that your interests are not separate from another.

“Miracles are a way of earning release from fear.” Miracle principle # 28

 “Miracles are examples of right thinking, aligning your perceptions with truth as God created it.” Miracle principle #36

Musings: An Invitation

Enter Here!

“The power of decision is your one remaining freedom as a prisoner of this world.” – A Course in Miracles, T. 12, VII.9:1

Welcome! This is an invitation to make a decision to take part in The Great Awakening that is occurring in all humanity at this time.

I know of no better teaching to facilitate this shift than A Course in Miracles. I have made the journey through the lessons of the Course with thousands of friends who have accepted its invitation to become miracle workers.

Miracles come from love that is not of this world. They are  a way of teaching us that we are both loving and lovable. It is through offering miracles that our minds will be healed of the belief in separation.

A Course in Miracles is very practical. It is for you and no one else. That may at first sound arrogant, but when you understand that when your mind is healed all minds are healed you will see it is both practical and efficient.

“The power of decision is your one remaining freedom as a prisoner of this world.”