A Day by Day Calendar: click here
School for A Course In Miracles
"The universe of learning will open up before you."
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Topics:
10/4 General Intro with Osmani
10/7 Chart of Metaphysics with Abe
10/18 Three Steps of Forgiveness with Javiera
11/1 The Jesus of ACIM & The Holy Sprit in ACIM with Erika
11/8 What is healing in ACIM? with Osmani
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Contact lyncorona@msn.com or ramirez30@comcast.net to get the Zoom class link for future classes in Spanish… answer these four quick questions in your email (to avoid zoom bombing by outsiders inappropriately attacking our meetings):
Our approach to A Course in Miracles (ACIM) can be quite different than other Course teachers in content and practice… so please watch a couple of our free YouTube video introductory presentations on the way we conduct the classes and how we see and practice A Course in Miracles.
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After watching some of the above videos and after reading class guidelines below, email us lyncorona@msn.com to get the new ZOOM class link and daily schedule updates… and answer these four quick questions in your email:
What’s your phone#?
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This process helps us avoid unwelcomed outsiders ‘zoom-bombing’ our meetings with offensive language and images.
** Sometimes requests for the Zoom link inadvertently go to junk mail and we miss them… We do try to routinely go thru the junk mail just in case, but if you do not hear from us in a day or two, please try again.
SFACIM Online Class Participation:
We are a School for A Course in Miracles (SFACIM), whose classes’ purpose is to present a coherent, consistent, and clear process of forgiveness based on Dr. Kenneth Wapnick’s teachings on Jesus’s A Course in Miracles (ACIM).
**Unlike most ACIM meetings and discussion groups, our SFACIM classes are different in that they are actual classes, and are not meant to be open forums for Course students and other Course teachers to give their own teachings and opinions about the Course, or other spiritual systems or other spiritual books.
Questions are definitely encouraged as in any classroom situation, and examples of students practicing forgiveness are occasionally requested from the facilitators.
During class, please try to avoid advice-giving (ie crosstalk) to someone else or the group as a whole. Our challenge is to become aware and responsible for our own process of the ‘undoing,’ and not avoid that process in ourselves by trying to “help” someone else.
It is however helpful at times to discuss and share what has, and hasn’t worked for us, in our own process of working and applying the Course, and specifically Ken Wapnick’s teachings on it.
To do that we first have to begin to learn and practice a little what the Course process of forgiveness is about … and understand at least some of Ken Wapnick’s teachings on the Course.
It is suggested and appreciated that all class participants take advantage of the opportunity to simply be students again, ask questions if so guided, and listen and learn and apply the Course teachings right there in class… no matter how many times they have heard or even taught the material themselves.
We are grateful for your patience and understanding.
We are a School for A Course in Miracles (SFACIM), whose classes’ purpose is to present a coherent, consistent, and clear process of forgiveness based on Dr. Kenneth Wapnick’s teachings on Jesus’s A Course in Miracles (ACIM).
**Unlike most ACIM meetings and discussion groups, our SFACIM classes are different in that they are actual classes, and are not meant to be open forums for Course students and other Course teachers to give their own teachings and opinions about the Course, or other spiritual systems or other spiritual books.
Questions are definitely encouraged as in any classroom situation, and examples of students practicing forgiveness are periodically requested from the facilitators.
It is quite helpful at times to discuss and share what has, and hasn’t worked, for us in our own process of working and applying the Course, and specifically Ken Wapnick’s teachings on it.
To do that we first have to begin to learn what forgiveness and healing are in ACIM… as we study Ken Wapnick’s teachings on the Course.
During class, we try to avoid advice-giving (also called crosstalk in 12 step meetings)… directly to someone else or the group as a whole. Our personal challenge is to become aware and responsible for our own process of the ‘undoing’ of our own ego selfishness and preoccupation, and not to avoid that process in ourselves by sometimes trying to “help” or fix someone else.
It is suggested and appreciated that all class participants take advantage of the opportunity to simply be students again, ask questions if so guided, and listen and learn and apply the Course teachings right there in class… no matter how many times they have heard or even taught the material themselves.
We recommend sitting as close to your router as possible, with your laptop or smart phone… This eliminates significantly a lot of the frozen screens and loss of audio during streaming.
Also, if you have the ‘5G’ option on network preferences on your computer, choose the 5G option over the regular option. (click here for tips on receiving stronger wifi signal)
And for strongest signal, hardwire your computer to your router for the best signal during the class.
Ego Decision*Maker Holy Spirit
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Guilt…. I am guilty! |
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Fear…. I will be punished! |
Sin…. You sinned (not me)!
Guilt…. You are guilty (not me)!
Fear…. You should be punished (not me)!
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The overall Course story (myth, if you will) goes something like this:
Once upon a time, we were all sitting around in Heaven as God’s One Son. The Course tells us that in Heaven there is no place where God the Father ends, and God the Son begins… whatever that oneness is, it’s not anything like what we experience in our world of time and space.
Then what seemed to happen is the Son of God pretended to step outside of Heaven, and play with the thought of separation. We say “seemed” because the Course’s Atonement Principle is that the separation never (and could never have) happened.
There were then two reactions to this “tiny mad idea of separation”. One, the part of our mind the Course calls the Holy Spirit (right mind), said that idea is impossible and silly and could not take place.
The other part of mind the Course calls ego (wrong mind), said yes: we want to pretend separation is true… take it seriously… believe it… and run with it.
And of those two reactions or voices, the third part of mind that chooses between these two (Ken Wapnick uses the term “Decision Maker”), chose to identify with the ego. This all took place in the internal place inside of us that the Course consistently calls mind.
The Story of Sin, Guilt, and Fear
In choosing to take the TMI (tiny mad idea of separation) seriously and listen to the ego, we then made up an ongoing separation story, and chose to believe each part of its three part narrative: (1) sin, (2) guilt, and (3) fear. But it was all “make-believe.” In other words we made it up, and then distracted ourselves with each ongoing part of the story into believing it.
These three steps (of sin>guilt>fear) mistakenly “proved” to ourselves that we had really separated from our Father in Heaven.
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To emphasize once again, mind is a part of us beyond time and space, beyond behavior in the world, and beyond our identification as personalities with brains and bodies. The Course talks about and uses the word mind more than two thousand times.
All this was the motivation for us to leave the realm of the mind and escape “God’s wrath.” This precipitated in what scientists today call the Big Bang, the beginning of the entire physical universe of time and space. The Course calls this universe of form “the world.” We basically took our awareness of ourselves as one gigantic separated Son of God, and then seemed to”explode” our consciousness into a billion billion parts. We fantasized an entire universe of tiny atoms, molecules, cells, and bodies… all the way up to star systems and floating galaxies.
In doing this we achieved two goals in our separation story;
The ‘beauty’ of this, from the ego’s point of view, is that now we are totally convinced we are individual bodies in the world… with no awareness at all that we have a mind, or that we could actually go inside and choose another Voice (the Holy Spirit’s) and be taught that separation is all made up.
This is when the Course comes along and says in Workbook Lesson #5: “We are never upset for the reason we think.”
And Lesson #34, “I could choose peace instead of this”… by going inside and asking the Holy Spirit for help to see you and me another way.
Meaning: It is possible for me to have an actual experience where I realize that all this separation and pain is simply made up. These separate identities and bodies are not who we truly are. And even though I’m still seeing images of separation in the world, I can experience peace right here, right now, by asking the Holy Spirit for help in realizing this. “I’m not a victim of the world I see.” (Lesson # 31)
And that, in a nutshell, is the Course’s process of “Forgiveness.” It is also synonymous with the word “Healing” on the Chart under the “Holy Spirit.”
I don’t forgive you or myself for what either of us did behaviorally…
But I can forgive (let go): By asking for Jesus or the Holy Spirit’s help, I become willing to let go of believing we are separated minds living in separated vulnerable bodies that could attack each other and ourselves in the first place… I become aware that our real connection and innocence as One Son of God is still intact, no matter what you or I do behaviorally as bodies. Our holiness and wholeness as God’s One Son is, and always will be, who we truly are. (Click here for discussion of these “Three Steps of Forgiveness.”)
Monthly Suggested Offerings for Live Online Zoom Classes:
$12 for an individual live online class (lasting about 75-90 minutes)… after your first free two weeks.
$30 a month for access to all class replays only.
$35 a month for one or two weekly live online classes (up to 8 live classes a month), and includes unlimited access to 1000-plus SFACIM video class library. You will receive access to two live interactive online classes a week, and 24 hour-a-day access to a storehouse of all our insightful recorded Course class replays on multiple major ACIM topics.
$45 a month for up to 4 classes a week (up to 16 live online classes a month), with unlimited access to all our hundreds of SFACIM class replays.
$50 (or more) a month for all our monthly classes… currently more than 20 live online classes a month, and includes unlimited access to the SFACIM video class library. (Best overall access to everything our School for ACIM has to offer... at less than two dollars a day.)
All Online Classes: approx. 75-90 minutes each
We hope if we repeat the Lesson title enough times… we will have some kind of short-lived magical experience where we temporarily feel better. However it will not be a miracle of real understanding and application of the lesson, and thus not a genuine release from fear.
The point is we already don’t believe what any lesson title says. If we did, we wouldn’t need the Lesson, or the Workbook, or the whole Course in the first place… Repeating a Lesson title over and over is simply spinning our wheels and goes nowhere if we don’t process the entire lesson…
Take for example Les. 5 “I am never upset for the reason I think.” Consciously we are always upset for the reason we think. Otherwise we wouldn’t be upset. Jesus is always trying to get us to realize how much we don’t believe the Lesson Title, or even want to believe it. We spend a huge part of our day telling ourselves (and others) why we are upset. We have to be honest and start with what we do really believe, and then ask Jesus to help us look at our upset a different way.
Lesson #93 title says “Light and joy and peace abide in me.” Then the lesson spends the next few paragraphs telling us what we do believe. At the level of the mind, it says “you (really) think you are the home of evil, darkness and sin.” In fact when we begin to look at all lessons in general, this is what Jesus usually does. In the title he spells out how the Holy Spirit sees us and the situation. Then in the rest of the lesson he explains how we as separated selves see it, with all our judgments against each other… These judgments of ours are the blocks to our awareness of the truth in each of the lesson titles. And it is these blocks we have to acknowledge and be willing to release.
The Course’s Introduction to the Text immediately informs us at the beginning of the Course that this is not a Course about love (or affirming love), but it is about removing our own blocks (our blaming and judging) to our awareness that Love is already a done deal (Text, page 1).
When we simply affirm or chant the lesson titles, we are missing the opportunity to really look at, admit, and surrender our judgments and what we do believe as egos. In that sense when we chant or sing a title over and over again, we are trying to shout down or deny what we actually think. No matter how many times we may repeat that title, we don’t get to the core ego issues of separation and judgment, and learn to let them go.
When we fail to look at the underlying ego thought system of separation and hate and how we have identified with it and believe it… affirming lesson titles is like having a cake full of not very nice stuff, and then spreading whip cream over the top to cover the cake up. The icky cake is still there.
It is the Workbook’s job not to get us to affirm the truth, but to help us realize the not-so-subtle ways we constantly resist the truth, and then with Jesus’ help to let that resistance go. Then what’s left is our awareness of the truth (which we don’t need to affirm at that point.) We simply know it.
The Course premise, that the world was projected out from the Son of God’s erroneous belief in the tiny mad idea of separation, is succinctly explained in “3. What Is The World?” section on p.413 in the Workbook:
The world is false perception. It is born of error, and it has not left its source. It will remain no longer than the thought that gave it birth is cherished. When the thought of separation has been changed to one of true forgiveness, will the world be seen in quite another light; and one which leads to truth, where all the world must disappear and all its errors vanish. Now its source has gone, and its effects are gone as well.
The world was made as an attack on God (by the Son of God in his delusional state of separation from God)… Thus the world was meant to be a place where God could enter not, and where His Son could be apart from Him.
And from Lesson 132 “I loose the world from all (or that) I thought it was.”
The world is nothing in itself. Your mind must give it meaning. And what you behold upon it are your wishes, acted out so you can look on them and think them real. Perhaps you think you did not make the world, but came unwillingly to what was made already, hardly waiting for your thoughts to give it meaning. Yet in truth you found exactly what you looked for when you came.
But healing is the gift of those who are prepared to learn there is no world, and can accept the lesson now…
There is no world because it is a thought apart from God, and made to separate the Father and the Son, and break away a part of God Himself and thus destroy His Wholeness. Can a world which comes from this idea be real?
To the degree that we do take it seriously, and then blame other people or situations for us not getting what we need or want, we are off running and interpreting all our dramas without allowing Jesus to remind us who we actually are… one joined invulnerable innocent Son of God, still intact in our mind. That realization would pull the rug on all our worldly franticness.
It is natural then as bodies in a frantic world to believe if we don’t do our Course lessons properly, and somehow become GOOD Course students, our salvation and happiness as such is at stake. Jesus is however trying to get us to realize that Our Innocent Sonship is already a done deal, no matter what we do or don’t.
One of the most implicit words that we could put into almost all the uplifting sentences in the Course is the word “already.”
Les. 75 “The light has come… already.”
Les. 80 “Let me recognize my problems have been solved… already.”
Les. 93 “Light and joy and peace abide in me … already.”
Les. 201-220 “I am not a body, I am free. I am still (already) as God created me.”
All of the statements above are already true. We are simply trying to pretend they are not, without ever admitting that’s what we are doing.
In the Course Jesus is trying to help us wake up to our already done-deal true Identity, through the process of forgiveness. It doesn’t matter whether we are good students or not. We are already ‘there,’ pretending we aren’t there, distracted by all our judgements (grievances) against others and ourselves. If we just let go of our judgements with Jesus help (admit them and let them go)… we would become aware of this Identity and then move through our day accordingly.
Les. 155: I will step back and let Him lead the way.
There is a way of living in the world that is not here, although it seems to be. You do not change appearance, though you smile more frequently. Your forehead is serene; your eyes are quiet.
We don’t have to be good Course students. We don’t have to do anything. We don’t have to be anything. We already are. Trying to be, or not be, a good student reinforces our belief that something’s wrong with us and needs to be corrected. It says we are not God’s One son already..
We only have to let go of insisting and proving we are not, and could not ever be, God’s Son. With Jesus or the HS help, we can let go of maintaining and investing in all our judgements on others and the attacks upon ourselves, which reinforce our made-up certainty that we are separated unhappy individual selves and not who we truly are.
How many times have we heard the phrase, when folks are talking about the latest channeled book, how… ‘it is just like the Course.’ However some immediate questions about their asserted similarity should arise:
Does the channeled information…
The answers to most (if not all) the above questions are inevitably no about 99.9 % of the time. And one can think of many other significant dissimilarities relating to the uniqueness of the Course when compared to other channeled material….
I used to belong to a church that channeled Jesus, along with many other Ascended Masters. I don’t refute that the channelers actually believed it was Jesus who was channeling through them. However after studying the Course in an even preliminary way, I can honestly verify that the message of the Course was, and is, fundamentally different than any of the channeled messages I ever heard. Those channeled messages were about behavior and how to conduct ourselves in the world, as if the problem(s) were here.
The content of the Course was and is totally different than any other traditional or new age spiritual message I’ve come across. Early on in Chapter Two, the Jesus of the Course makes clear that this is not a Course about behavior (Text, p.29), but about changing our inner guide to change the way we see things (i.e. change our inner teacher, thus change our perception).
Therefore the voices behind the different channeled (or gospel) messages, with definably different content than what are the Course’s teachings, must come from different sources other than the source of the Course, even if they are all called by the same name (in this case Jesus). Remember the 1950’s game show “To Tell The Truth”… will the real Jesus please stand up?
That brings us to the four Gospel stories that we all know. Most modern Bible scholars have no problem with discussing the fact that the Jesus stories in the gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John are mostly historically not true, though most scholars would find them theologically sound… meaning they tell spiritual truths and not historical facts.
All were written many years after Jesus and the disciples were long gone, and each gospel writer (obviously not the four names we hear so often) chose or made up different Jesus stories and different parables to get their particular message across to a particular audience they were writing to. Check out sometime how different the birth and resurrection stories are in each gospel… not to mention how many of Jesus parable stories in each gospel were totally unique to that particular gospel.
If we apply the questions listed above about channeled messages to any of the four gospel Jesuses, we will quickly see that the content of the gospel messages contain hardly any (if any) of the Course’s ideas about how we got here into the world (by believing in separation in the mind), and then how we get back to Heaven (through forgiveness…i.e. letting go of separation and judgement). None of the gospels ever mention the concept of mind (mentioned in the Course more than 2000 times), and guilt in the New Testament is real and alive and well, especially in the Sadducees and the Romans (with nothing about an internal ego belief system that we all share).
Occasionally a gospel story or two may reflect some metaphysical truths in the Course (like the Prodigal Son or the Sermon on the Mount). Overall the four different Bible Jesuses are all very separatist (and very different from each other)… only certain souls are or can be saved, but definitely not all souls. All four of the Bible Jesus are also very spiritually special. Jesus is the only real Son of God in all of the gospels; the rest of us are just God’s sinful children at best.
The only thing the gospels really have in common with the Course is that the King James version of the Gospels was written in iambic pentameter (… but none of the other versions are.)
In Heaven, there is no place where God the Father ends and His Son begins.
(Ch.18, p.386, par.9…. WB Les.132, p.244, par.12)
Some eastern spiritualities profess non-duality, but their approach to enlightenment is usually to get around a Master or guru who knows true being, and let his understanding rub off on you.
The Course’ approach to eventual non-dual awareness of Self is similar to needing a master, but in this case the master is the Internal Guide the Course calls the Holy Spirit, and His process to let go of the not-self is forgiveness. First we look beyond our brother’s guilt to his real self, and then we look beyond our own guilt to our own sinlessness. Forgiveness does not take place in a worldly frame, but at the inner level of experience the Course calls the mind.
Most New Age spiritual approaches and certainly western traditional religions treat sin, insanity and the body and its behavior as real and needing fixing in this world of form. Bringing God or Jesus into the world to fix things, including our relationships, is simply not the Course.
Whenever we see another spiritual path talking about what we can do as bodies in the world to be more holy, it is off and running in a different direction than the Course. Could be diet, or exercise, or certain ways to meditate… specific healing techniques, chanting specific mantras or praying certain prayers, or ways to fix relationships between bodies. Not that anything like that is wrong or discouraged, but from the Course’s point of view they are not seen as a way to true peace. The Course’s path is simply a change of mind, a change of perception, by choosing a different inner teacher.
Worldly rituals of any kind primarily base our salvation and our peace of mind on those “behaviors”… and not on changing perception of who we are, with the Holy Spirit as guide. The Course is that simple but also that uncompromising. One can begin to see that believing mixing a body-based behavioral approach (to achieve or become more holy) with the Course’s metaphysics (that we are already holy) begins to dilute the message and process of the Course itself.
The Course says seek not to change the world (or your body or personality or individuality), but seek to change your mind about the world. (Text p.445, par.1)
(Part One)
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