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: The Healing Purpose

sunflower field photo

The following was a letter to a friend who was in prison for a crime committed during one of his many bouts with addiction to cocaine. He wanted to wake up but was fixated on his particular dream.

I had known my friend for ten years and during this time he had been incarcerated four times. This time it was for ten years. Prior to this he had been incarcerated at least five times, all while on a cocaine rampage. He was released at the age of 50 having spent most of his life in prison.

Without  purpose that can be applied regardless of the circumstances of his life, his situation would have been cause for desperation. My point in sharing this letter is that without purpose we are all hopelessly caught in our pitiful little dreams, be they pleasurable or painful.

Dear Friend:

This answer to your concerns about your incarceration comes from the heart. May it go to the heart, find its mark, and be helpful.

The brick and mortar prison that you find yourself in is a metaphor for the situation we all find ourselves in. The prison I am referring to is the mind that is ruled by the ego.

The ego is the thought of separation taking form. It is a prison house of our own making. Self-centered and selfish the ego sees everything in relationship to itself. The ego thinks the body is its home.

As if imprisonment were not bad enough the ego’s practice is to inflict pain or suffer pain instead of helping one another to escape. Of course I am speaking metaphorically. The escape from the prison house we have all made is accomplished only by learning that the person we think we are, that long lasting separate entity, is not what we are.

No one asleep and dreaming knows the way out of the dream he is dreaming. After all he believes it is real. He needs help.

The escape is through the mind and everyone, regardless of the circumstances of his life must come to that realization. Humans tend to make comfort, safety and security their goal and when they get them they think they have escaped the prison of separate interests. What they have attained is a pleasant form of fear.

Changing the circumstances of our life is not a change at all because it is the mind that needs to change. It is not hard to see that we take the thought system that we live by with us wherever we go. It’s all about us. To use a common analogy, changing circumstances is like shifting around the deck chairs on the Titanic. What difference will it make? The mind ruled by the ego is a sinking ship. It needs a new captain, not a change of location.

Once you have made the decision to become a happy learner from The Teacher for Truth the outcome is certain. You will escape the dream. How long the journey takes depends upon your trust in The Teacher and your willingness to bring the darkness in you to Him.

Choosing between the ego thought system of self-absorption and The Teacher’s thought system of healing is the only power the mind has. The rest of the time it’s idling, going nowhere.

Our relationships provide the opportunities for us to learn what’s in our mind. The ego’s thought system of separation goes like this:

1.      The other guy is the guilty one.

2.      If it weren’t for him (the other guy), my life would be peaceful and happy. (Conclusion: My anger is justified.)

3.      I’m right. He’s wrong.

4.      Somebody should pay, and it’s not going to be me. I’m innocent.

5.      The other guy should be the one to suffer.

Behind every encounter some version of the above is always going on when the ego is ruling your mind. It only takes one person to stop playing this game. You. To do this you must have the desire to learn from a different teacher—the one that would free you and your brother together.

The Holy Spirit’s thought system, which you have chosen to learn because you are a student of A Course in Miracles, sees your brother differently. He sees

1.      The other guy is innocent regardless of his behavior because he is not a body.

2.      He is present in your life to help you escape from your dream of isolation.

3.      There is no loss to anyone. Both parties gain.

4.      Your attitude toward your brother is your attitude toward yourself.

5.      You and your brother are joined in mind. Changing your mind changes all minds.

“Together or not at all” is the Holy Spirit’s mantra.

You get to choose between the ego and the Teacher of Truth. That makes you the ultimate Decision Maker. All power and glory is in your hands. It is the only freedom you have in this world.

To choose the Holy Spirit as your Teacher you must recognize when the ego is in charge, acknowledge that you no longer want it to rule your mind and ask the Holy Spirit for His Teaching instead. It’s really simple to tell which you have chosen. When you operate under the ego’s rule you don’t feel loving and happy. Simple.

Everyone you meet is your savior from isolation. By seeing our relationships in this way, every day becomes an exciting chance to remember our true undivided nature. Purpose is everything!

Everyone engaged in dreaming is trying to get rid guilt by dumping it on someone else. Refuse to blame the other guy for your misery. (The real source of your misery is your choice to be a self-centered, special, individual entity.) Ask The Teacher for help. You are not going to be able to rehabilitate yourself.

           “Humility … does require that you be not content with less than greatness that comes not of you.” – A Course in Miracles, T.381.

Blessings,

Lyn

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.

Musings: Living the Course

SharingThis 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

The door to peace is always open. We just need to turn toward it.
The Open Door

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

LynCorona-180sq
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 Eagle RiverThe 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

cupid1

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.