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
You are here: Home / Archives for Musings

Musings: A Little Willingness

lily pads

“Salvation is easy just because it asks nothing you cannot give right now.” – A Course in Miracles, Text, page 382

It is of enormous relief to know—finally, and with certainty—what our only function is. We should be looking one another in the eye and winking the “we’ve got a secret” look of lovers in love.

The secret is that we have the key to our happiness in our very hands. It is nowhere else.

The key to happiness is forgiveness. It is the simplest thing you will ever learn because it requires nothing of us that we cannot give right now. How do you like them apples? Do I have your attention, or did you turn away again? From the bottom of my heart I hope not, because this is the “pearl worth any price.”

The key is in your hand: guaranteed!!!! Think mind when you read hand. Hopefully you will learn here and now how to turn it: also in your mind. Learning requires that you be right-minded as opposed to wrong-minded.

Wrong-mindedness fears change. It fixates on what it thinks it knows. It thinks happiness is getting what we want. It thinks a whole lot of things are real, all of which turn out to be illusions.

Right-mindedness is willing to question what it thinks it knows, including where happiness comes from. It is willing to learn another way of seeing. It is willing to turn away from all assumptions of what reality is and walk the razor’s edge where our true education can begin.

The choice is yours. You have the willingness; it has already been given you. Don’t let fear hold you back. Give it to the One Who gave you willingness instead. Daily, a thousand times a day, you make this choice.

In order to learn from the teacher of forgiveness who knows the way to happiness,  you must resign as your own teacher. This is signified by the little willingness. This is the only way that you can ever be happy.

“If you listen to the wrong voice, you have lost sight of your soul.” – A Course in Miracles

There is a silent voice in you that will show you the way. Every second that you do not plan is an instant made available to the one who can give you your function. Your function is your happiness. To learn that your function and your happiness are the same is the simplest thing you will ever do. Any effort that you make will interfere. The following prayer from The Little Willingness, shows us how small our part is.

“I who am host to God am worthy of Him.

He Who established His dwelling place in me created it as

 He would have it be.

It is not needful that I make it ready for Him, but only

 that I do not interfere with His plan to restore to me

 my own awareness of my readiness, which is eternal.

I need add nothing to His plan.

But to receive it, I must be willing not to substitute my

Own in place of it.”

Musings: All Would Be Love

all would be love
my balcony

“…you believe that without the ego all would be chaos. Yet I assure you that without the ego, all would be love.” 

(T. 15. V. 1: 6-7)

If we would lay aside our need to be somebody—all ideas about our self and all ideas we hold about the person before us—we would find that we are peacefully joined beyond either of those identities.

What is real is shared and what is unreal can’t be. Only the mind can be shared and it is common to all without exception. It is the personal—the body, private thoughts, the psychological self with all its needs and wants—that is unreal and therefore can’t be shared.

Awakening is from the personal. The unwillingness to enter a shared experience is the only hindrance to the realization of our Self which resides in the mind. (This is why the ego does not want us to learn that we are a mind.)

The shift from identification with the body to the awareness of the self as mind is a choice. We all will eventually make it, but usually not until we experience the pain and suffering our personal needs, wants and special interests bring upon ourselves and others. At this point we may begin to ask ourselves if there might not be a better way of relating that does not involve our specialness.

I have made it my practice to learn from Jesus that my brother and I share the same mind. It is a choice I make every morning before I begin the busy doings of the day. Remembering my goal, my part in every encounter is simply to recognize when the ego asserts its special interests and be willing to offer them to Jesus in exchange for something of greater value. I am the learner and I have a teacher.

In this process I find there is no strain to get approval, acceptance, or recognition from my brother. The listening is open and gentle when I realize the relationship is not in my hands and I do not have to make anything happen. There is no fixing, correcting, dazzling, enthralling, outsmarting, captivating, or manipulating. In allowing the presence of love beyond either body to hold the relationship I experience ease and acceptance of myself and my brother.

Jesus has never failed to show me that my brother is a much better witness to our shared reality of holiness than he is to my ego’s demands that my specialness be indulged.

The mind is truly miraculous when it is not contaminated by the ego. Spiritual practice is learning how to use the mind effectively to choose against the ego. Once we learn that we have a mind and that our only option in this world is to choose between the ego’s tyrannical rule or Jesus’ kind and gentle teaching of forgiveness we can become the happy learners of the truth of the following statement:

“…you believe that without the ego all would be chaos. Yet I assure you that without the ego, all would be love.”  T. 15. V. 1: 6-7

Musings: “Miracles Are Natural”

 “Miracles are natural. When they do not occur something has gone wrong.”

First, let’s be clear what a miracle is not.

A miracle is not an extraordinary external phenomenon like a vision of Jesus in a cloud. It’s not having a check show up in the mail that just covers the rent when the bank account is empty. It’s not even the spontaneous remission of a terminal disease.

Miracles are corrections in the mind for our errors in perception. (Think interpretation when you read perception.) Interpretations are perceptions. When your perceptions are unloving, you are misperceiving; something has gone wrong.

That something is what’s in the way of what is natural: the miracle. The miracle is always present. We are not aware of it because we have put something in the way that keeps it from our awareness. That something goes by many names: ego, false self, dream figure, phantom, to name just a few. Perception is distorted by the personal needs, wants and desires of the false self.

 The body is not our home. A Course in Miracles teaches us that the body’s eyes don’t see and its ears don’t hear.

The senses merely report to the brain. The brain then interprets the data based upon what the mind wants to see. Having decided that we are a separate self everything the brain reports is interpreted to validate the separate self. It is a closed system.

The miracle is a way of changing your mind about yourself. You cannot do this without the help of a presence other than the ego in your mind. Call it what you will: Holy Spirit, Loving Presence, this presence is kind and knows what is in your best interests. It is your Self. Don’t be afraid of it; it is there to help you remember what you are.

You must have noticed that scarcity dominates the self centered point of view. Experiencing the lack that we have inflicted upon ourselves we seek outside for approval, acceptance, recognition, and respect. Because of our imagined needs, we don’t see anyone as they are but only as a means to fulfill our needs. It is this distorted way of perceiving that the miracle corrects.

 By choosing the miracle we are turning toward the love we have been seeking outside ourselves. Instead of sacrificing others to our needs our relationships provide the opportunity for miracles.

The miracle is not something we do. Miracles are natural expressions of love. Without the interference of the ego’s getting mechanisms, impersonal love flows freely. It blesses everyone indiscriminately; in other words it makes no special selections as to who is worthy and who is not. The miracle teaches us what we are, not who we are.

The miracle-minded process looks something like this:

 1. You fess up!  You admit that something has gone wrong. You can’t recognize a solution to a problem that you don’t know you have. You are not experiencing the miracle; you need the miracle.

 2. You take responsibility. The something wrong is with you. The problem is not “out there” in someone else. The problem is in the mind along with the answer.

 3. You decide to become a learner. As a learner you can be taught. You make a right-minded decision to turn your unloving perceptions over to that Loving Presence for its point of view.

4. You do nothing. The miracle is just that; a miracle. It happens. It will show you that no one did anything to you; you were not harmed or hurt in any way.

Note: If you still find yourself trying to “do” the miracle yourself, you have not fully turned the problem over to the Loving Presence. If that’s the case, go back to step 3 and investigate as to what perceptions you still want to keep. Maybe you are not willing to let it go at this time. Then “unwillingness” is what you would bring to that Loving Presence.

Perhaps your trust in the Loving Presence is very weak at this point. Then lack of trust is the perception that you would offer for correction. Always begin where you are. 

Consistent willingness to be a learner places your mind in its natural state of grace. It enables you to give without any sense of loss. As long as you perceive lovelessly you remain a learner.

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.