Musings : “I need devoted teachers…”
Video: ACIM Hangout with Lyn Corona and Bruce Rawles
A video interview/dialogue with Lyn Corona, student and teacher of A Course In Miracles since the 1970s by interviewer Bruce Rawles, editor of ACIMblog.com
Musings: Living the Course
This is a course in miracles. It is a required course.
What exactly is a miracle? And why is it required?
We long to be earnest about the Course’s teachings, yet the deeper we go into it the more we learn how small our part is. In fact it is a tiny wish, a little willingness, the tiniest grain of wisdom. We learn it is arrogance that makes our part seem big– too hard to accomplish. Mostly we learn how not to interfere.
All salvation asks of us is but a little wish that the truth be true, and a little willingness to overlook what is not there….a little sigh that speaks for Heaven as a preference to this world that death and dissolution seem to rule.
“Your wishes and the Will of God are one.
God wills that His Son have everything.”
The extent to which we suffer is unfathomable. And what for? To preserve the belief in a will contrary to God’s? And whose will might that be. It must be an imaginary will for there is no will but God’s. It is this imaginary will that “get’s busted” as we travel together the path of the miracle.
Musings: A Simple Daily Practice
Lesson 5 and Lesson 34 are two excellent lessons in A Course in Miracles that would be really helpful to remember and practice daily. Apply these any time that you do not feel loving toward all your relationships and yourself.
Ask yourself frequently how you feel throughout the day.
Being self aware means watching yourself from outside the dream instead of being completely absorbed in it. When you are watching you are awake in the dream meaning you are bringing awareness to it. When you are completely involved in the dream you are sleepwalking.
When you feel anything other than peace, say:
“I am never upset for the reason I think.” Lesson 5
There is no need to analyze. There is no need to talk with someone else about how you feel. It is your business, your work, and the point at which a shift in identity from the body to the mind occurs. You are a mind, not a body.
The ego would have you think you are upset because of something that happened outside* you. Saying “I am never upset for the reason I think” means you are willing to question and let go of your investment in the ego’s perception of why you are upset. It is always wrong.
Remember unless you notice when you are upset and then look at how you are using the world, the body and your relationships to justify the upset, you can’t take this step of admitting you are wrong. The fact is that you decided to abandon the peace of God first and now you are looking for a way to keep this decision hidden. If you were experiencing the peace of God nothing could upset you. What better way to avoid responsibility than to blame someone or something outside you. This is how the ego keeps the guilt in your mind over separating from God. It projects it and sees it in the bodies around you (including your own).
“I could see peace instead of this”. Lesson 34
When you are not invested in your idea about why you are upset you can sincerely say “I could see peace instead of this.”
Returning to peace is not some super extraordinary mystical thing. Peace is always just beyond the ego’s interpretation of things. A decision against the ego is a decision for the Holy Spirit. It is one or the other. This is the only decision we ever need make.
*What is considered to be outside you? The body and the world. Both are projections of the thought of separation in the mind. Included in the body are thoughts, feelings, the brain, and the all sensory apparatus which report to the brain for interpretation. The mind, according to the Course, is not our brain. It is the place inside us where we choose to believe in separation, or forgiveness.
Musings: About Lyn Corona
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 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 (now School for A Course in Miracles 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 a curriculum 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.
School for A Course in Miracles is organized under the non-profit (501(c)3, Ark of Peace, which was founded in 1990 by school director, Lyn Corona, for the purpose of extending the message of peace through forgiveness as presented by A Course in Miracles. Since the inception of the Ark of Peace, for a few years it had a retreat center called Heaven on Earth in Pine, Colorado; a Miracles Center (1991) on South Pearl, which later moved to 924 Logan St.; The Pearl Street Abbey, a residential community for teaching and learning the Course; The Satsang Cafe, with an upper room for Course classes; and now the School for A Course in Miracles (formerly School of Reason)and the Ken Wapnick Memorial Library– all to fulfill its mission to extend the teachings of the Course.
Musings: A Valentine’s Message
TRUE INTIMACY:
“Cupid is a symbolic creature that represents the ontological reality of a higher order of existence. The unique imagery displayed in the Cupid figure was the creation of an ancient people with special spiritual wisdom. To be struck in the heart by Cupid’s arrow did more than lead to worldly romance. It represented a transformation of the heart from natural to spiritual love.”
The word intimacy means inner most.
The higher order of existence is the mind, the home of true intimacy.
This musing on intimacy comes with a warning: it may ruin all your notions about romantic love and intimacy. But I thought I would give it a go, since so many of us have reached a point of looking beyond the body for intimacy. We first have to realize we are miserable in our relationships before we can be earnest in looking in another direction. Congratulate yourself if you have reached that point, for you have come a long way and have bruised yourself considerably. You are at the perfect place to learn another way to be in relationships, including your most special ones.
The first thing you need to know about this other way is that intimacy includes everyone. From the perspective of the ego this is a horrifying thought because its need to be special is terribly threatened.
It also helps to know that there is only one kind of love and that is God’s. His love is the only love there is. There are not different kinds of love, one kind for our children, one for animals, another for lovers, and yet another for parents. God’s love is the same and shared equally with everyone. So any ideas we have about different kinds of love must come from our special needs and our need to be special.
True intimacy has no needs. It is our special needs that keep us from seeing our brothers as they are in which case every relationship would be maximally fullfilling without competing with any other relationship. Our needs distort our perception of our brothers, seeing them as a means of satifying our special needs and ultimately our most important need to witness to our non-existent individuality. This is the ego’s version of a relationship. In sacrificing another to satify our special needs the relationship is bound to be very unsatisfying.
There is a way of seeing our special relationships through different eyes that help us learn that we have no needs. For that we will need a teacher, in this case Jesus, who suggests that we “resign as our own teacher, for we have been badly taught”. We do not know the way to God’s Love. After we decide to change the purpose of our relatinships we should take his hand and begin to establish our first intimate and out-of-time relationship.
Intimacy is of the mind. Please be advised that we are not talking about the brain. The brain is part of the physiology of the body. The thoughts it thinks it thinks are not real thoughts. Intimacy cannot be experienced between two bodies, as much as we have tried to convince ourselves that it can. Establishing a relationship with Jesus plays a very important part in learning that only a relationship without sacrifice can be intimate.
While our relationships are all the same in purpose at the mind level, they are not all the same in form or behavior. We do different things with different folks. The difference is the the the Holy Spirit’s purpose is the same for all of them.
Valentine’s Day, when we celebrate love and romance, will soon be here, and that’s a wonderful thing to enjoy. Nothing is taken away from us and romance is lovely when there is no sacrifice of anyone to our needs. The day before, on February 13, 2016, School for A Course in Miracles is offering a full day workshop on True Intimacy: love without needs. If you are interested in learning another way to be in all your relationships we hope you will join us.
by Lyn Corona
Musings: Who’s Your Teacher?
“Resign now as your own teacher, for you have been badly taught.”
To the one who takes pride in the quality of their dream I say, I will wait until you change your mind.
This is not said to be cruel. It is simply a waste of time to talk of waking when it is sleeping that is wanted. The quality of the dream matters not. A dream, is a dream, is a dream.
The purpose of dreams is to please yourself. They are personal and private.
The source of all dreams is fear. Yes, even the lovely ones. The fear comes from guilt; the guilt comes from wanting to be separate and special, because it is a lie.
The awakening dream, referred to as the happy dream in A Course in Miracles, has a different purpose. Its purpose is forgiveness of guilt so the dreamer can awaken and accept the Love of God. For this The Teacher, Who comes from outside of dreams, is needed.
The only real power we have in this world is to make one choice: to learn from The Teacher. All other uses of will take us deeper into the dream.
“Resign now as your own teacher.” T-12. V.8:3
It is The Teacher’s job to show us reality. This we cannot do for ourselves because we already beleive in unreality. We must invite The Teacher in order to learn who we are. That invitation is the little willingness. It will change the direction of your thinking and your life.
Reality is impersonal. Only one who has seen beyond the world can teach what we are. Without these teachers there would be no hope of salvation for special persons who think they are living in a world.
We need help. The first step beyond the limited and personal view is to look with the impartiality of The Teacher at our character and the other characters in our dream. Both are shadows of projected guilt. The Teacher shows us how to undo our belief in them through forgiveness.
“Forgiveness….is still, and quietly does nothing……It merely looks, and waits, and judges not.”
From: What is forgiveness? Workbook, p. 401
You already are spirit: complete and healed and whole. You cannot become what you already are. No amount of effort will take you there. Instead, cease imagining yourself to be what you are not. You are not a person that was born into a world that will eventually die and leave. Anything that comes and goes cannot be real.
You brought the world with you when you came. You are not in the world. The world is like a tiny spec of dust in the mind that is you.
Try this:
Think of yourself as existing only in this moment, without a future or a past. Allow things to be exactly as they are. Don’t seek to change anything. Wait here and become a happy learner of The Teacher who can show you a different way of seeing that reveals the real world.
Do this regularly and your personhood will begin to dissolve.
Don’t fight yourself if you find yourself resisting. You might still like being you.
No problem.
We will wait until you change your mind.
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.
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.