School for A Course In Miracles

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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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Ken Wapnick Videos on Death and Beyond… & Tim’s Recommended Movies about Transitioning Death

 

Ken Wapnick 5 minute videos on “Death”:

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For Ken’s Foundation’s Youtube channel with over 200 (ten minute or less) videos: 

click here

 

 

Some thought-provoking movies about death and dying and the afterlife:

1) Ghost… the classic with Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore, and Whoopi Goldberg

*** 2) Coco…. beautiful animated CGI flick about Day of the Dead

*** 3) Departures… wonderful Japanese movie about forgiveness and respect

* 4) Hearts and Souls… funny and insightful with Robert Downey Jr, where 4 dead souls “haunt” him and work out their unresolved issues thru him.

5) What Dreams May Come… Robin Williams looking for his wife in the afterlife

* 6) Meet Joe Black… Anthony Hopkins as the dying man and Brad Pitt as “Death,” who has come to get him.

** 7) Flatliners… unusual movie about a group of med students who take turns taking their lives and bringing each other back, and in so doing learn some powerful forgiveness lessons, with very young Kevin Bacon, Kiefer Sutherland, and Julia Roberts. 

*** 8) Six Feet Under TV series… one of the best tv series ever! It’s about a family running a funeral home in LA and their many conversations with the dead folks they are working on…

* 9) All of Me… funny movie about souls inhabiting other bodies after death, with Lily Tomlin (the inhabiter) and Steve Martin (the inhabited)

10) One for The Angels… another classic: Ed Wynn meets Mr. Death in a 1959 Twilight Zone Show (Season 1, #2) on Netflix…   click here  

*** 11) Collateral Beauty… Ed Norton hires three actors to play Death (H. Mirren), Time, and Love to help his friend Will Smith get past his grieving. (A Tim & Lyn favorite!)

12) The Seventh Seal… Ingmar Bergman at his best, about a knight returning from Crusades and his interactions and conversations and chess game with Death.

13) Two X-Files Shows…  [1]”Tithonus” (6th Season, Eps. 10) about a photographer who can’t die:    https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B001DCEK96/ref=atv_dp_season_select_s6

* 14)  [2] “How The Ghost Stole Christmas” :(6th Season, Eps. 6)

Ed Asner and Lily Tomlin as two dead souls that haunt Mulder and Scully on Xmas Eve    : https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001DCEKAU

15) Heaven Can Wait… clever and funny, with Warren Beatty as dead soul mistakenly taken and James Mason as angel-in-charge.

** 16) Sixth Sense… part horror flick/part moving drama about afterlife, with Bruce Willis (nominated for 6 Academy Awards)

* 17) Brand New Testament… Very very quirky movie where God’s daughter releases (on everyone’s cell phone) the date they are going to die….

* 18) A Little Bit of Heaven… with Kate Hudson as woman who finds out she is terminally ill.

19) PS I Love You… Wife finds letters (with helpful suggestions for her) from her dying husband to her… after he dies, with Hillary Swank, Gerald Butler, and Kathy Bates.

** 20) Biutiful….Inarritu directs, Bardem stars as the dying man

*** 21) Amour… touching movie about love between elderly French couple.  It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and was nominated in four other categories: Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Screenplay, and Best Director.

** 22 & 23) Dead Man Walking & The Green Mile… two very great movies about death row.

*** 24) Kodachrome… on Netflix,  movie with Ed Harris as disgruntled dying parent on road trip with his estranged son.

25) Whose Life Is It Anyway?… Richard Dreyfus as man who fights for his right to die.

(The above starred *** shows are particularly recommended!)

 

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The Belief in The Murder/Death of God, and Our One True Self

More than 50 years ago in April 1966 (does it feel that long?), Time Magazine came out with its now legendary cover “Is God Dead?” It is a topic that the Course explores and discusses as the basis for our choosing to believe in separation from Our Father in Heaven. In order to pretend our disconnect from Source, we had to justify and believe in our ‘killing’ or destroying our connection and Oneness with God.

It is easy and quite normal from the ego’s point of view to skip over and quickly ‘forget’ those passages in the Course that talk about the death of God. The idea of ‘murdering’ God and our own true identity as His One Son is consciously so repulsive, not to mention in truth impossible.

Which is why, as the Course explains, we have to constantly project that guilt/blame for believing we did just that, onto the world and someone or something else, besides us… or we would let go of that secret belief that death is even possible, in a heartbeat (the Holy Instant). 

 

Here are some of the references in the Course…

where Jesus talks about the how and why of our belief in God’s death, and our own, and their impossibility:

 

“Our Ego Belief in the Murder and Death of God and Our True Self”

 

Text:

Ch.16, p.343, par. 12,

The special relationship (any relationship with a person or thing, seen through the eyes of the ego) must be recognized for what it is; a senseless ritual in which strength is extracted from the death of God, and invested in His killer as the sign that form (the entire physical universe of time and space) has triumphed over content (our Identity as Love), and love has lost its meaning. Would you want this to be possible, even apart from its evident impossibility? If it were possible, you would have made yourself helpless. God is not angry. He merely could not let this happen. You cannot change His Mind. No rituals that you have set up in which the dance of death delights you can bring death to the eternal (our true reality… and God’s).

Ch.19, p.403, par.7

7 There is no stone in all the ego’s embattled citadel that is more heavily defended than the idea that sin (the belief in our severed Oneness with God) is real: the natural (ego) expression of what the Son of God has made himself to be (separate from God), and what he is (now… a killer, a destroyer of Oneness). To the ego, this is no mistake. For this is its reality; this is the “truth” from which escape will always be impossible. This is his past (sin), his present (guilt) and his future (fear). For he has somehow managed to corrupt his Father, and change His Mind completely.

Mourn, then, the death of God, Whom sin has killed! And this would be the ego’s wish, which in its madness it believes it has accomplished.

 

Ch.23, p.486, par.2

2 Do you not realize a war against yourself (our true reality as God’s One Son) would be a war on God? Is victory conceivable? And if it were, is this a victory that you would want? The death of God, if it were possible, would be your death. Is this a victory? The ego always marches to defeat, because it thinks that triumph over you (your Real Self) is possible.

And God thinks otherwise. This is no war; only the mad belief the Will of God can be attacked and overthrown. You may identify with this belief, but never will it be more than madness. And fear will reign in madness, and will seem to have replaced love there. This is the conflict’s purpose. And to those who think that it (the attack and overthrow of God) is possible, the means seem real.

 

Ch.26, p.543, par.6-7

But judge him not (your brother), for you will hear no song of liberation for yourself, nor see what it is given him to witness to (his and your sinlessness), that you may see it and rejoice with him. Make not his holiness a sacrifice to your belief in sin. You sacrifice your innocence with his, and die each time you see in him a sin deserving death.

…You who would make a sacrifice of life, and make your eyes and ears bear witness to the death of God and of His holy Son, think not that you have power to make of Them (God and His Son) what God willed not They be.

 

 

Workbook:

 

Les.72, on  attacking God and God’s death, p.124, par.5-6

And every grievance that you hold insists that the body is real. It overlooks entirely what your brother is. It reinforces your belief that he is a body, and condemns him for it. And it asserts that his salvation must be death, projecting this attack onto God, and holding Him responsible for it.

6 To this carefully prepared arena, where angry animals seek for prey and mercy cannot enter, the ego comes to save you. God made you a body (so the ego sarcastically tells us…) Very well. Let us accept this and be glad. As a body, do not let yourself be deprived of what the body offers. Take the little you can get. God gave you nothing. The body is your only savior. It is the death of God and your salvation.

7 This is the universal belief of the world you see.

Les.163 on the death of God and His One Son, p.309, par.5-6

Here is the opposite of God (death) proclaimed as lord of all creation, stronger than God’s Will for life, the endlessness of love, and Heaven’s perfect, changeless constancy. Here is the Will of Father and of Son defeated finally, and laid to rest beneath the headstone death has placed upon the body of the holy Son of God.

5 Unholy (God’s Son in a body that will die) in defeat, he has become what death would have him be. His epitaph, which death itself has written, gives no name to him, for he has passed to dust. It says but this: “Here lies a witness God is dead.” And this it writes again and still again, while all the while its (death) worshippers agree, and kneeling down with foreheads to the ground, they whisper fearfully that it is so.


…God was once alive and somehow perished; killed, apparently, by those who did not want Him to survive. Their stronger will could triumph over His, and so eternal life gave way to death. And with the Father died the Son as well.

 

Manual:

#17, p.45, par.7

 Accept your separation, but do not remember how it came about. Believe that you have won it (from God), but do not retain the slightest memory of Who your great “opponent” really is. Projecting your “forgetting” onto Him (God), it seems to you He has forgotten, too.

7 But what will now be your reaction to all magic thoughts (belief that certain things or forms in the world can make us feel better, or make us feel worse)? They can but re-awaken sleeping guilt (for having separated from God and destroying the Oneness with our Creator in our minds), which you have hidden but have not let go. Each one (each magical thought that some thing, and not God, can make us feel better) says clearly to your frightened mind, “You have usurped the place of God. Think not He has forgotten.” Here we have the fear of God most starkly represented. For in that thought has guilt already raised madness to the throne of God Himself. And now there is no hope. Except to kill. Here is salvation now. An angry father pursues his guilty son.

Kill or be killed, for here alone is choice. (What the ego tells us…) Beyond this there is none, for what was done cannot be done without. The stain of blood can never be removed (reference to Macbeth’s wife), and anyone who bears this stain on him must meet with death.

 

#27, p.67, par.5

5 The “reality” of death is firmly rooted in the belief that God’s Son is a body. And if God created bodies, death would indeed be real (when we believe we are bodies, we are all ‘dead men walking’) . But God would not be loving. There is no point at which the contrast between the perception of the real world (the world seen thru the Holy Spirit’s eyes) and that of the world of illusions becomes more sharply evident (as our belief in death).

Death is indeed the death of God, if He is Love. And now His Own creation must stand in fear of Him. He is not Father, but destroyer. He is not Creator, but avenger. Terrible His Thoughts and fearful His image. To look on His creations is to die.

 


Text, Ch.23, p.495-498, Sec. III & IV excerpts (where the word ‘murder’ is used more than 20 times):

He (all of us) may deny he (believes he) is a murderer and justify his savagery with smiles as he attacks (judges). Yet he will suffer, and will look on his (mind’s) intent in nightmares where the smiles are gone, and where the purpose (murder) rises to meet his horrified awareness and pursue him still.

For no one thinks of murder (the death of God and our innocence as His Son, in our minds) and escapes the guilt the thought entails. If the intent is death (in the mind), what matter the form it takes (in the world)?

You are not asked to fight against your wish to murder. But you are asked to realize the form it takes conceals the same intent (all form in the world mirrors only one of two thoughts in the mind… love or death). And it is this you fear, and not the form. What is not love is murder. What is not loving must be an attack. Every illusion is an assault on truth (love).

Each form of murder and attack that still attracts you and that you do not recognize for what it is, limits the healing and the miracles you have the power to extend to all. Yet does the Holy Spirit understand how to increase your little gifts and make them mighty. Also He understands how your relationship is raised above the battleground, in it no more. This is your part; to realize that murder in any form is not your will. 

Who with the Love of God upholding him could find the choice of miracles or murder hard to make?

The bad news is that Jesus is telling us… we secretly believe we continue to kill our real connection with God and our brothers, and destroy our awareness of our true identity as God’s One Innocent Son… every time we attack and judge our brothers, by projecting our own guilt onto them.

The good news is that we didn’t, couldn’t, and never will be able to do that in reality! God still loves us, and Jesus didn’t go anywhere, and we can’t be ‘prodigal sons’ no matter how much we pretend.

For more discussion “On Death and Dying”

see Ken Wapnick’s Cd set (or MP3 or DVDs)

click here

Course References on Death and Dying:

“There is no death, the Son of God is free…”

27. WHAT IS DEATH?

Manual p.66

1 Death is the central dream from which all illusions stem. Is it not madness to think of life as being born, aging, losing vitality, and dying in the end? We have asked this question before, but now we need to consider it more carefully. It is the one fixed, unchangeable belief of the world that all things in it are born only to die. This is regarded as “the way of nature,” not to be raised to question, but to be accepted as the “natural” law of life. 

————————————

 Text, Chapter 23, p.493, par.19

19 There is no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In any state apart from Heaven life is illusion. At best it seems like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is not life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is not in Heaven is not anywhere. Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusion stands; senseless, impossible and beyond all reason, and yet perceived as an eternal barrier to Heaven. Illusions are but forms. Their content is never true. 

——————————-

WB Lesson 163, p.309

There is no death. The Son of God is free.

 1 Death is a thought that takes on many forms, often unrecognized. It may appear as sadness, fear, anxiety or doubt; as anger, faithlessness and lack of trust; concern for bodies, envy, and all forms in which the wish to be as you are not may come to tempt you. All such thoughts are but reflections of the worshipping of death as savior and as giver of release.

The idea of the death of God is so preposterous that even the insane have difficulty in believing it. For it implies that God was once alive and somehow perished; killed, apparently, by those who did not want Him to survive…

Our Father, bless our eyes today. We are Your messengers, and we would look upon the glorious reflection of Your Love which shines in everything. We live and move in You alone. We are not separate from Your eternal life. There is no death, for death is not Your Will. 

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28. WHAT IS THE RESURRECTION?

Manual p.68

1 Very simply, the resurrection is the overcoming or surmounting of death. It is a re-awakening or a rebirth; a change of mind about the meaning of the world. 

2 The resurrection is the denial of death, being the assertion of life. 

There is no death. The Son of God is free.

———————————————

Text, Chapter 19: The Attainment of Peace

C. The Third Obstacle to Peace: The Attraction of Death, p.416

1 To you and your brother, in whose special relationship the Holy Spirit entered, it is given to release and be released from the dedication to death. For it was offered you, and you accepted. Yet you must learn still more about this strange devotion, for it contains the third obstacle that peace must flow across… What seems to be the fear of death is really its attraction.

 7 Those who fear death see not how often and how loudly they call to it, and bid it come to save them from communication. For death is seen as safety, the great dark savior from the light of truth, the answer to the Answer, the silencer of the Voice That speaks for God. Yet the retreat to death is not the end of conflict. Only God’s Answer is its end. The obstacle of your seeming love for death that peace must flow across seems to be very great. For in it lie hidden all the ego’s secrets, all its strange devices for deception, all its sick ideas and weird imaginings. Here is the final end of union, the triumph of the ego’s making over creation, the victory of lifelessness on Life Itself.

 

D. The Fourth Obstacle: The Fear of God, p.420

1 What would you see without the fear of death? What would you feel and think if death held no attraction for you? Very simply, you would remember your Father…

4 See how the belief in death would seem to “save” you. For if this were gone, what could you fear but life? It is the attraction of death that makes life seem to be ugly, cruel and tyrannical. You are no more afraid of death than of the ego. These are your chosen friends. For in your secret alliance with them (death and the ego) you have agreed never to let the fear of God be lifted, so you could look upon the face of Christ and join Him in His Father…

… The exaltation of the body is given up in favor of the spirit, which you love as you could never love the body. And the appeal of death is lost forever as love’s attraction stirs and calls to you. From beyond each of the obstacles to love (and peace), Love Itself has called.

Also see:

*Workbook, Les. 167, p.318-319:

“You think that death is of the body. Yet it is but an idea (in the mind)… Death is the thought that you are separate from your Creator… What seems to be the opposite of life (in Heaven) is merely sleeping.”

*Song of Prayer Pamphlet, Part 3. Healing:

Sec.I p.16, par. 1-2

Sec. II p.17-18, par.1-5 (including…)

“This is what death should be; a quiet choice, made joyfully and with a sense of peace, because the body has been kindly used to help the Son of God along the way he goes to God. We thank the body, then, for all the service it has given us.

But we are thankful, too, the need is done to walk the world of limits, and to reach the Christ in hidden forms and clearly seen at  most in lovely flashes. Now we can behold Him without the blinders, in the light that we have learned to look upon again. — We call it death, but it is liberty. It does not come in forms that seem to be thrust down in pain upon unwilling flesh, but as a gentle welcome to release.

 

If there has been true healing, this can be the form in which death comes when it is time to rest a while from labor gladly done and gladly ended. Now we go in peace to freer air and gentler climate, where it is not hard to see the gifts we gave were saved for us. For Christ is clearer now; His vision more sustained in us; His Voice, the Word of God, more certainly our own. — Death is reward and not a punishment. But such a viewpoint must be fostered by the healing that the world cannot conceive.”(S-3.II.2:1-4/3:1-5/5:5-6)

For Further Discussion

on Death & Dying

by Ken Wapnick:

(Click on pictures below for info)

 

 

Happy Resurrection!

Please visit this  Course & Coffee Chat replay on the Course’s meaning of the Resurrection (click here)…

and check out these selected Course readings given at Easter Time about the Resurrection:

Chap. 20, sections I & II p. 425-428 “The Gift of Lilies”

WB Les. 135  p. 256 par. 24-25-26 “This is my (our) Eastertime.”

Manual #28 “What is The Resurrection?” p.68-69

Click here

for our latest SFACIM post on

“Healing: What It Is, What It Isn’t”

“The Jesus Report”… on The Ego Conspiracy

 The Jesus Report Is Out!

(a 1300 page document, with only minor redactions)

on ‘The Ego’s Conspiracy’ to keep us locked in believing in separation:

Here’s The…

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74dg-WfhsjA

 

SFACIM YouTube Channel: Video on “Collusion”

 

Video on “Collusion with The Ego”

(click here)

 

 

School for A Course in Miracles

 

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… Be sure to click on the “VIDEOS” link at the top of SFACIM YouTube page to see the list of  replays of videos and chats available from the School on many Course topics !

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Questions to Ken: Jesus’s New Year’s Message on Joining?

IMG_0646

One of the major themes that we will be talking about is joining, what it is, and what it is not. The end of workbook lesson #92 discusses this. To the ego joining always means joining with itself. We discussed how in the original ontological instant when the decision maker had to make his choice, he joined with the ego instead of with the Holy Spirit. From that joining, which is really a pseudo-joining, because it is joining with nothing, the whole world is made. We continually join with this limited and separated self that is the ego. In the world, the limited and separated self is no longer in the mind but is in the body, and so joining for us in the world is joining with other people. There is an important line in the text that says “minds are joined; bodies do not” (T-18.VI.3:1). Bodies do not join. When we find ourselves in sympathy and empathizing with people who are in pain, or identifying with a particular group against another group, we are identifying and joining with their bodies. That is not joining, because we are joining with an illusion. We are joining with weakness instead of strength.

In true joining, we change our minds and move away from the ego and back to the Holy Spirit. That is the meeting place that lesson #92 talked about, the meeting place of the little “s” self with the capital “S” Self. The capital “S” Self is represented for us in the dream by the Holy Spirit, Who reminds us of the Self we are as Christ. The little “s” self is the self that believes in separation. When the decision maker moves away from identifying with the ego self and begins to move towards the Holy Spirit, that is the meeting place. The meeting place is within the mind, the decision-making part of the mind that chooses to identify and join with the Holy Spirit. When we join with Him there is no separation. As we said earlier, the ego believes in separation, difference, judgment, and attack, and they all are virtually the same thing. In fact, not only virtually, they are the same thing. When we join with the Holy Spirit we are joining with the unity of God and Christ. We are joining with the love of Heaven that has no division or differentiation to it. Then when we peer out into the dream we no longer experience differences or separation. As I mentioned earlier, whatever is on the film that is running through the projector in the movie theater is exactly and identically what we perceive on the screen. So, too, when we join in the mind with the Holy Spirit, which is joining with the unity of Christ, we experience unity and love on the screen of our lives, in the world. It does not mean the body’s eyes will not perceive differences, but the differences will make no difference. In other words, the Love of God that we are now identifying with is totally unaffected by the seeming differences that the body’s eyes perceive.

That is what Jesus means in the passage at the end of Chapter 15, which was written at New Year’s time as a kind of New Year’s prayer: “Make this year different by making it all the same” (T-15.XI.10:11). In other words, don’t make differences real. Chapter 15 is the first place in the text where Jesus discusses special relationships. And the hallmark of specialness is differences: You are different from me, you have something that I want, and I want to get it from you. When we join with the Holy Spirit or with Jesus in the mind, we no longer experience differences. If we no longer experience a difference between ourselves and the Love of God, it is impossible to experience any real difference out here in the world. We do not see people as separate and different from us, and therefore we make no judgments against them and we don’t attack.

“The Greater Joining”—the title of the section we will look at later—is this joining of Christ with Himself, or the joining of Christ with God. We do that first in the mind, and automatically the vision and unity and experience of love extend through us into the dream, and we no longer experience people as different from us. No matter how mangled their bodies may be, no matter how much in pain they are, no matter how terrible their situations are, we do not experience ourselves as different from them. We will go into all that in more depth later on.

For a list of hundreds of Course topics talked about by Ken Wapnick in a question and answer format: click here

 

 

Arrogance vs Humility, Part One

(By Tim Wise)

How do we see ourselves?

What does arrogance look like?

What does humility look like?

How does God see us?

As I was planning to do a Thursday Chat about arrogance and humility, I did what I do on any topic and started with Webster. On arrogance, the dictionary definition is “being full of excessive and overbearing pride.”

With humility, Webster sounds like the Course: “having or expressing a sense of selflessness.” Really, that’s what it says. That’s the #1 definition that’s used the most in everyday English for being humble… letting go of our sense of ‘lower-case’ self.

A couple of my own ideas about arrogance, for me anyway… include a few things:

1) It has a puffed-up unwarranted overkill about it, like a balloon full of hot air.

2) Arrogance is not very likable, if not mostly distasteful. My sense is even the arrogant don’t like it in others.

3) Finally, arrogance needs an audience. It demands an internal belief that others are acknowledging the arrogant’s superiority, whether it’s true others are really noticing or not.

For humility, I would agree with Webster on an attitude of selflessness. I would also add the Course’s principle that the truly humble focus on shared interests in the mind, and let go of their investments in the seeming external differences.

The Course’s Take on Arrogance and Humility:

The Course actually uses the words arrogance/arrogant 55 times, and humility/humble over forty. Whenever arrogance is spoken about in the Course, it is always in relationship to its opposite, humility. The two themes are covered for the most part in Lessons #61, 152, and 186. “True humility” is especially described as the top of the ladder of prayer, in the Song of Prayer Pamphlet, p. 8:

Prayer (defined in the Pamphlet as not supplication to the Holy Spirit for specifics, but as a state of communion with the HS) is the way to true humility… and true humility will come at last to grace the mind that thought it was alone and stood against the world… Its selflessness is Self… Humility has come to teach you how to understand your glory as God’s Son, and recognize the arrogance of sin.

(Excerpts from Song of Prayer p. 8)

A Course in Miracles - combined volume - hardbound - English

Some Course thoughts from Les.#61…

“I am the light of the world.”

Who is the light of the world except God’s Son? This, then, is merely a statement of the truth about yourself. It is the opposite of a statement of pride, of arrogance, or of self-deception. It does not describe the self-concept you have made. It does not refer to any of the characteristics with which you have endowed your idols. It refers to you as you were created by God. It simply states the truth. 

To the ego, today’s idea is the epitome of self-glorification. But the ego does not understand humility, mistaking it for self-debasement. Humility consists of accepting your role in salvation and in taking no other. It is not humility to insist you cannot be the light of the world if that is the function God assigned to you. It is only arrogance that would assert this function cannot be for you, and arrogance is always of the ego.

True humility requires that you accept today’s idea because it is God’s Voice which tells you it is true. This is a beginning step in accepting your real function on earth. It is a giant stride toward taking your rightful place in salvation. It is a positive assertion of your right to be saved, and an acknowledgment of the power that is given you to save others.

( WB, Les 61, p. 102, par.1-3)

Arrogance and humility are simply about how we see ourselves… we either are “the light of the world” we perceive, or we’re not. Our identification as separated egos insist on the latter. We believe we have done the impossible (a great definition of arrogance), and separated from our Father in Heaven. Now we believe we are these inflated balloons full of hot air (bodies), that will eventually deflate (die). How silly is that!

 

Of course, our ego would like to run in its own direction, relentlessly maintaining belief in separation. It would use all the above Course statements its own way, especially “the power that is given you (us) to save others.” The ego would make it all about separate bodies saving other separate bodies, especially my body/personality saving yours. However that power to save (i.e. wake up from the dream of  separation) is never, ever, played out in the world behaviorally, or by the separated us at all.

Whatever happens in the world is always a mirror reflection of two (and only two) chosen thoughts or chosen teachers in the mind, the ego or Holy Spirit…  If we are choosing the inner ego voice of  belief in separation in our minds, whether we act like Crusader Rabbits (a cartoon from the 1950’s) saving anyone or everyone in the world, it will always be a refection of that teacher in our minds.

Whenever our behavior is reflecting an inner ego choice, any worldly act of kindness/salvation cannot help but be an act of arrogance! Full of hot air and blown-up pride. It typically manifests as… “I am Holier than tho, and I will save you, the lesser.”

These ego-based “kind” actions certainly have the ring of the three ideas above about arrogance:

  • It’s puffed-up and overblown.
  • It’s usually not wanted or liked or even appreciated, and if so… only temporarily, and then later resented.
  • And it’s believed by the ‘do-gooder’ that he’s admired for it, or at least should be.

It doesn’t mean we should not help out in any situation. The Course is only saying what really matters is which internal teacher am I doing ‘the helping’ with…

—————————

For Part Two on “Arrogance vs Humility” on this website:

{including how do I know which teacher in my mind I am choosing}

click here

Also, for a more in-depth discussion of arrogance & humility,

see Ken Wapnick’s

“Making the Holy Spirit Special:

The Arrogance of the Ego”

(on 9 CD set or MP3 download)

click here

 

Celebrating The First Ten Years of…

School for A Course in Miracles: click here

Would you like to help the School for A Course in Miracles…

Grow and Expand?

Click here

 

Arrogance vs Humility, Part Two

So how do we know, in any given moment, which teacher we are internally choosing?

How do we know if our seeming act of kindness is genuine or not?

 Does pain seem real to us in the situation? 

How do we feel?

How can you know whether you chose the stairs to Heaven (HS) or the way to hell (the ego)? Quite easily. How do you feel? Is peace in your awareness?

Are you certain which way you go? And are you sure the goal of Heaven can be reached? If not, you walk alone. Ask then your Friend (HS) to join with you, and give you certainty of where you go.

(Text Ch. 23, p.494, par.22)

 

How can you tell when you are seeing wrong, or someone else is failing to perceive the lesson he should learn? Does pain seem real in the (my) perception? If it does, be sure the (my) lesson is not learned.

And there remains an unforgiveness hiding in the (my) mind that sees the pain through eyes the mind directs. 

(WB Les. 193, par.7)

Over and over the Course tells us that the way we save the world is by realizing that we and the world are already saved. The Course’s Introduction to the Text resounds throughout the entire Course: 

The Course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim at removing the blocks to the (our) awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance.

(Text p. 1)

 

In other words we are already saved, and pretending we’re not. Our innocence as God’s one Son is still intact. But we distract ourselves from that true identity with our finger pointing: “look at what you did to me!”

As the above Lesson# 193 says, “there remains an unforgiveness hiding in our minds”… hiding from us. The bottom line unforgiveness is always hanging onto the guilt for our supposed disconnection from God in our minds… which never really happened. We don’t really want to admit that, much less let it go. And we use all our projected wordly resentments and blames to cover that awareness over in ourselves and stay preoccupied elsewhere.

It’s the ongoing ego game of self deception. You may know the recurring line in the R.E.M. song “Bang and Blame.” Its lyrics keep repeating the phrase “bang, bang… blame, blame… so let it go.” We constantly target and shoot (bang) at each other with our judgements (blame), to stay distracted from our own made-up internal incrimination.

 

Every addict/alcoholic in recovery knows one of the first things they have to do is look… look at and initially admit that they are addicts (in the Course, the bottom-line ‘addiction’ is to separation). Without the addiction they believe they will die, even though the addiction is killing them. Same with us: without separation we secretly made ourselves believe we’ll die.

And by themselves without help, addicts can’t stop. With the Course, it’s the Holy Spirit who helps, and without Him we can’t stop our judging.

Underneath that understanding, recovering addicts begin to realize they’re tenaciously clinging to, and nursing, their resentments or unforgivenesses, to maintain and justify their addiction.

Similarly, what is preventing us then, in this very second, from feeling saved, or causing us to experience anything less than real peace? There is always a judgement, an unforgiveness, we are holding onto. And we have to convince ourselves and others, that judgement is justified. It is those judgements that block our awareness of who we truly are, “the awareness of love’s presence.” We and our brothers are love, and come from love, and will always be love.

So no matter how right we think we are about our conscious judgements… The only way to see past them is to acknowledge them, how awful and deep they do run. All of our conscious judgements are simply a projection of our own inner guilt for pushing Jesus away in our minds. So, to stop pushing him out of our awareness, ask  Jesus or the Holy Spirit for help to let those judgements go, especially the underlying idea that we even could push God away in the first place. We then begin to have an experience beyond those judgements of others and ourselves to our true reality.

“I am never upset for the reason I think.”: 

This idea can be used with any person, situation or event you think is causing you pain. Apply it specifically to whatever you believe is the cause of your upset, using the description of the feeling in whatever term seems accurate to you. The upset may seem to be fear, worry, depression, anxiety, anger, hatred, jealousy or any number of forms, all of which will be perceived as different. This is not true. 

(WB Les#5, par.1)

A restatement of Lesson #5 could easily have said… “What if I’m never judging for the reason I think?”  

Like car maintenance plans, what if my judgements are simply a separation maintenance program… and that in my arrogance, I’m in total denial about what is really going on. I’m just making up reasons to blame and point fingers, even tho in the world those judgements may seem totally justified. However justified or not in worldly terms, what if all that is just a smokescreen for what’s really happening?

 

If all that drama is based on not who and what we truly are, what do judgements about someone else’s behavior or my own have to do with the real me or the real you! They simply keep me stuck in believing you and I are these separate vulnerable things, at the mercy of whichever way the wind blows, disconnected from our true reality.

So the Holy Spirit and Jesus ask us to try this:

Where concepts of the self have been laid by is truth revealed exactly as it is. When every concept has been raised to doubt and question, and been recognized as made on no assumptions that would stand the light, then is the truth left free to enter in its sanctuary, clean and free of guilt. There is no statement that the world (and all of us) is more afraid to hear than this:

I do not know the thing I am,

and therefore do not know what I am doing,

where I am, or how to look upon the world or on myself.

Yet in this learning is salvation born. And What you are will tell you of Itself.

(Text Chap.31, p. 660, par. 17)

Jesus says… my brothers, the willingness to ask for my help to see and experience yourselves the way I see you is true humility. Anything less is simply silly arrogance.

For an in-depth discussion on discerning which teacher I am listening to,

see Ken Wapnick’s

“A Hawk from A Handsaw”

(on 5 CD set or MP3 download)

click here

 

The Nonprofit “Ark of Peace” (under which School for A Course in Miracles is affiliated)

Bridge - Autumn Color

Founding:

The Ark of Peace was founded as a 501 © (3) nonprofit organization in 1990 to support and extend the teachings of forgiveness set forth in A Course in Miracles. In the Course, the ark of peace symbolizes the truth that remains as we release others from our mistakes and honor them as they are. “You made him not; no more yourself. And as you free the one, the other is accepted as he is.”
 
A Course in Miracles elevates our relationships to spiritual significance by teaching us to use them to free ourselves from the illusion of separation. Its message is practical and its accomplishments palpable while living in the world.
“The ark of peace is entered two by two, yet the beginning of another world goes with them.”

Board of Trustees:

Lyn Corona, president

TimWise, vice president

 

Outreach:

Since its founding in 1990 the Ark of Peace has served hundreds of individuals through teaching, healing, and community service. Throughout these diverse forms the single purpose has remained awakening from the dream of separation through the Course’s unique form of forgiveness.

Donate:

The Ark of Peace is the legal entity for the School for A Course in Miracles. The Ark was founded in 1990 as a 501© (3) nonprofit organization to share the teachings of A Course in Miracles. All donations are tax-deductible.
Checks made out to Ark of Peace/School for A Course in Miracles will be used exclusively to help the school carry out its teaching function by providing classes, events, publications, media, and an online resource through this website.
Please consider contributing to our message of peace through forgiveness with your donation. Your generosity will help us serve others seeking to discover the peace of mind that lies beyond the illusory belief of separate interests.
We gratefully accept each donation, regardless of amount, to further our mission of sharing A Course in Miracles’ message and helping others understand and apply its teachings. Please click on the Donate button (at the top right of every page) to make a donation.

* If there is a specific place/cause you would like your donation to be applied to, please mention it in the notes box upon payment.*

If you would prefer to make a donation via check, you can send your check to:
School for ACIM
c/o Lyn Corona
1663 Steele Street #1007
Denver, Colorado 80206
Questions about your donation? Please contact Lyn Corona here.
Thank you for your donation!
————————————

A Letter from The School President:

Dear friend of School for A Course in Miracles,

I want to take a moment to let you know how much we appreciate your monthly contributions to School for A Course in Miracles.

Most importantly, by your generosity you join us in our common purpose of learning forgiveness and freeing yourself and your brothers from misunderstanding and the hate that ensues. A peaceful mind is not a little gift. Through our joint sharing we hope to accelerate this process. Together we are part of a greater purpose than the one we once came to this world for.

Secondly, regular monthly donations are an important part of our overall financial stability because they enable us to budget with certainty. Regardless of the amount you are able to contribute your regular contribution is very helpful to us and we thank you for it.

If you are not yet a regular contributor and would like to be one, here is how you go about it:

  • Go to our School for A Course in Miracles website atwww.sfacim.org
  • Find the donate button on any page and click on it
  • From the dropdown menu choose your option. Monthly donation is among them.
  • Choose an amount, from $5 to $200 or set your own amount
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  • If you prefer check, send to:School for A Course in Miracles1663 Steele St. #1007Denver, CO 80206

About our regular online classes.

We have online classes on Saturday and Tuesday mornings at 9:30 am, and Thursday evenings at 6:30 pm. They are accessed through our Zoom classroom link which can be found on every weekly news post or by going to the website and finding any online class. The link is always the same.

Every earnest student is welcome to attend. We do not make specific charges for these classes. Instead, if you find value here, we hope you will consider making a monthly donation to support School for A Course in Miracles.

About donations.

School for A Course in Miracles is the teaching order of Ark of Peace, a 501 © (3) nonprofit organization founded in 1990 to support and extend the teachings of forgiveness set forth in A Course in Miracles. In the Course, the ark of peace symbolizes the truth that remains as we release others from our mistakes and honor them as they are. “You made him not; no more yourself. And as you free the one, the other is accepted as he is.” L. 200

We thank you for choosing School for A Course in Miracles for your Course education.

With appreciation,

Lyn Corona