Musings: A Simple Daily Practice
Musings: Who’s Your Teacher?
“Resign now as your own teacher, for you have been badly taught.”
To the one who takes pride in the quality of their dream I say, I will wait until you change your mind.
This is not said to be cruel. It is simply a waste of time to talk of waking when it is sleeping that is wanted. The quality of the dream matters not. A dream, is a dream, is a dream.
The purpose of dreams is to please yourself. They are personal and private.
The source of all dreams is fear. Yes, even the lovely ones. The fear comes from guilt; the guilt comes from wanting to be separate and special, because it is a lie.
The awakening dream, referred to as the happy dream in A Course in Miracles, has a different purpose. Its purpose is forgiveness of guilt so the dreamer can awaken and accept the Love of God. For this The Teacher, Who comes from outside of dreams, is needed.
The only real power we have in this world is to make one choice: to learn from The Teacher. All other uses of will take us deeper into the dream.
“Resign now as your own teacher.” T-12. V.8:3
It is The Teacher’s job to show us reality. This we cannot do for ourselves because we already beleive in unreality. We must invite The Teacher in order to learn who we are. That invitation is the little willingness. It will change the direction of your thinking and your life.
Reality is impersonal. Only one who has seen beyond the world can teach what we are. Without these teachers there would be no hope of salvation for special persons who think they are living in a world.
We need help. The first step beyond the limited and personal view is to look with the impartiality of The Teacher at our character and the other characters in our dream. Both are shadows of projected guilt. The Teacher shows us how to undo our belief in them through forgiveness.
“Forgiveness….is still, and quietly does nothing……It merely looks, and waits, and judges not.”
From: What is forgiveness? Workbook, p. 401
You already are spirit: complete and healed and whole. You cannot become what you already are. No amount of effort will take you there. Instead, cease imagining yourself to be what you are not. You are not a person that was born into a world that will eventually die and leave. Anything that comes and goes cannot be real.
You brought the world with you when you came. You are not in the world. The world is like a tiny spec of dust in the mind that is you.
Try this:
Think of yourself as existing only in this moment, without a future or a past. Allow things to be exactly as they are. Don’t seek to change anything. Wait here and become a happy learner of The Teacher who can show you a different way of seeing that reveals the real world.
Do this regularly and your personhood will begin to dissolve.
Don’t fight yourself if you find yourself resisting. You might still like being you.
No problem.
We will wait until you change your mind.
Musings: What is Healing?
“The Holy Spirit speaks to you. 
He does not speak to someone else.”
ACIM Text, page 576
Only you can be healed.
You are a mind, not a body and not a brain.
“At no instant does the body exist at all.”
The body is a dream figure in a mind that has not yet awakened from its sleep.
When the mind is healed, love will extend from it to all minds because minds are joined; bodies are not. A Course in Miracles must be learned entirely or not at all because it is an uncompromising teaching in non-duality. It foretells the end of the ego which becomes suspicious and then vicious when it hears any message of non-specific, indivisible love.
Attempts to heal others are avoidance strategies. By focusing on others we escape the only healing there can be– our own. “Others” , or better, the idea of otherness, exists only in the unhealed mind. When it is healed there are no “others”. Beingness is all-inclusive. There is no specialness in being, therefore the ego hates it.
We can’t do love. We can only be love.
When we want to be healed our single purpose makes it possible not only for ourselves but for everyone because minds are joined.
If it is that simple why do we not want to commit to our own healing? Because we are afraid.
And why are we afraid? Because our idea of love is an attack in which we, a separate person, give our own version of love to another or other separate persons. We are not the author of love. We are afraid because we feel guilty for “doing” love on our own terms instead of surrendering to the Love that is our Source. Special love (the ego’s idea of love) brings guilt and guilt demands/expects punishment. The guilt, of course, is denied and buried, but we remain fearful without knowing why.
The answer to love as an attack is in the holy instant where there are no others, because the holy instant is the recognition that you are free of the past, the future, and the body. It is here and only here that you are healed and love is welcomed. In welcoming love you are blessing the world.
Your own healing is all that is required to heal the world of all its suffering.
True healing offers love without attack. You don’t heal or help someone else. You accept it for yourself by coming to this instant and laying aside all questions, longings, wanting, everything you think you know about yourself and others. In the holy instant everything is done for you and you will remember the real world in which there is nothing to fear.
Musings: There Is No Death
“Death is a decision not to decide.”
I was on an interview years back with friends and Course teachers Nouk Sanchez and Tomas Viera, authors of Take Me To Truth. The interviewer was Carrie Triffet author of Long Time No See.
Carrie asked Tomas about his life threatening health challenge and how he was dealing with it. (That’s Tomas in the picture on the right.)
His remarks were those of someone whose vantage point of perception had shifted from within the body to beyond the body. This shift in perception is the reward of practicing forgiveness that A Course in Miracles promises. It’s like lucid dreaming where you are awake in the dream and therefore not affected by it.
What I heard in Tomas’s voice was the absolute conviction of someone that no longer sees the body as his home. It is a rare person indeed that does not care if their body lives or dies. The freedom and peace that he enjoys was absolutely palpable.
The best it gets within the dream is to (fearfully) prolong the body’s life and feel as good as possible until its inevitable end comes. Why don’t more of us ask, “Is this as good as it gets?”
The best evidence that there is a God are these folks, who appear to be living in a body, who see a different world in which there is no fear. Having left the world of sickness, pain, suffering and death, they reside in the deathless zone of the Eternal. Every one of them would tell us that this transformation of mind is available to all of us without exception. Tomas is one of those examples.
Just today on Facebook I read about three very unexpected deaths. The suffering of friends and family is enough to make anyone want to see a different world. First we must believe that it is possible. I invite those who know this place of residence and the new vision that arises within it, to speak out. Let those who suffer know that it does not need to be this way.
Many many years ago, when A Course in Miracles first came into my life, I remember reading, “Death is a decision not to decide.”
I puzzled over that for a long time. It wasn’t until recent years that I fully understood. Death is a decision made in the mind that is ruled by the ego. It is the will of the separated self. It’s not God’s Will. It is a way of preserving our false sense of identity. We seem go out one door (in death), and come back in another (in birth), but we are still simply dreaming of separation.
The mind only changes when a decision is made to place it under the authority of God’s Teacher who shows us there is no death. It is an illusion of suffering that only exists in the mind under the authority of the ego. We must each make that decision to change what rules our mind. Once we do our Eternal nature is revealed and death is forgotten as a possibility.
Musings: Back Again
I think my last blog post was quite some time ago. Blame it on broken links, many changes in WordPress and a serious lack of technical skills on my part. I recently decided to renovate our SFACIM website with the help of Bruce Rawles, an amazingly skillful webmaster and all around very patient person. What you will find below is also on the About page, but since it is really an introduction and an invitation I wanted to make sure all subscribers to SFACIM received it.
Welcome to School for A Course in Miracles.
I don’t feel that I am overstating my capabilities when I say that I am a learner. Not in the traditional way of accumulating information to gain some advantage, but out of a deep curiosity about what lies beyond a self-centered perspective from which most of us view the world.
I was eleven years old the first time I had an “unusual experience” that gave me my first taste of an alternative point of view. I lived in the country, 14 miles from town, and being an only child I spent a lot of time on my own in nature. This particular time I was engaged in a favorite pastime at which I had developed great skill.
There was a river that ran through our property, and when the water was low enough, the larger rocks were exposed so that I could jump from rock to rock in a steady rhythm, running upstream like a salmon. Only one foot at a time could land on each rock and the game was to go as fast as possible without loosing my balance and dumping into the river. This particular time I suddenly found myself located outside my body in a timeless zone that was perfectly still and peaceful while my physical body kept jumping rocks. I never forgot the experience.
I was a freshman in high school the first time I heard the word enlightenment. I had no idea what it meant, but I caught the scent, like a hound on the trail of something big. The next time I was at the local library I checked out the only two books that seemed somewhat related to the topic. I remember one of the authors was Alan Watts. Nothing I read in those books satisfied my desire to know what enlightenment was. I continued my search off and on for years, knowing someday I would find something that could explain enlightenment and the timeless zone that I knew was more real than anything I had experienced since the river.
It was in the latter part of the 70’s when the A Course in Miracles came into my life. I had just finished reading Jane Robert’s mind-blowing The Nature of Personal Reality which set the stage for the entrance of the Course. I immediately recognized it as the answer to my questions about why I was here, what gives meaning and purpose to life, why I was suffering and how it could end. And also how to get to the timeless zone and stay there forever.
As a beginning student of A Course in Miracles, I developed my own practice of learning. I was living in the mountains about 40 miles west of Denver so I didn’t know there were such things as study groups. As far as I knew the Course was a self study program. The only help available was through asking the inner Teacher to show me the meaning of a lesson or a complicated passage from the text. I would ask and somewhere in the course of my day there would be an incident or an encounter that would give me the understanding. The Teacher became very real for me, always answering in some form I could understand.
I started offering classes, workshops and retreats on the Course in 1986 and with a few brief sabbaticals have continued to do so until this day. Over the years I established several centers for the study of the Course, have been an itinerant teacher traveling the U.S, and most recently joined with some of my colleagues in establishing the School of Reason for students and aspiring teachers of A Course in Miracles. I also began this blog. The point of all our doings, mine or anyone else’s, is that they are curriculums for our learning and vehicles for sharing another way.
The most repeated lesson in A Course in Miracles is “I am not a body. I am free”. Thank God, I can finally say it and know that it is true and not just some fluke that happened on the river one day. We don’t reside in a body and on some level we all know that this is true. That shift, from body to mind, is what A Course in Miracles is all about. It is a shift from a self-centered point of view to a transcendent presence that is mind. It’s a miracle.
It is not only possible to be in the world but not of it; it is essential. Our lives can reflect the ease and freedom of our real residence out of time where we are whole eternal minds in perfect communication with a non-physical universe of spirit comprised only of intangible Love.
The step out of time and into eternity (the timeless zone) calls for humility and the willingness to learn another way. We have to admit that we don’t know how to get there from here. Instead of it happening accidentally, like it did for me on the river, we have the inner Teacher that knows the way, and unlike my early experience that did not last, we can learn to reside there forever.
Here, in this world, is where our transformation takes place. We don’t die to get to Heaven. We just wake up. Enlightenment is not a place to travel to. It is right here. Right now.
Musings: Making Our Weak Commitment Strong
“AN UNTRAINED MIND CAN ACCOMPLISH NOTHING.”
The ideas shared in lessons 181 to 200 of A Course in Miracles are designed to help us in “firming up our willingness to make our weak commitment strong.” In other words, we know we want to change our minds, but we are dealing with the entrenched thought system of the ego which is set as the default mechanism for our thinking and decision making.The ego rules when we are not certain of our goal and the means to accomplish it.
Each of these lessons will lead us home, but first they will expose our mistaken choice for the ego so it can be seen and gone beyond. What remains unseen is still there, functioning beneath the surface of our awareness, where it remains only to be projected outside the mind.
Lesson 181- I trust my brothers who are one with me.
This lesson is not about trusting other bodies to do what is honorable, fair and good. Your brother is not his body or its behavior, although the ego, whose triumph over God is the body, would love you to think so. This lesson is referring to the sinlessness of the Christ mind which we all are and which is always worthy of trust. The ego, whose mantra is “one or the other”/”kill or be killed”, can never be trusted.
Students of A Course in Miracles, trying to do the spiritual thing, will often take a lesson like this—I trust my brothers who are one with me—and try to trust the body and its behavior even though it is ruled by the tyranny of the ego.
It is entirely possible, in fact it must be practiced vigilantly, to trust the One Self that we are while not denying the harmfulness of the ego’s decisions which are always based upon self interest. The distinction lies in understanding that the lessons in the Course, are about the content of your mind, and the content you believe to be in your brother’s mind, and not the forms that we seem to take, along with the form’s behavior. The basis for practicing forgiveness is understanding the difference.
A Course in Miracles is written to the mind that has the power to choose. There is a choice to be made and only you can make it. Only the time you choose to make it is up to you. Eventually everyone will make it because it is the only real choice. The alternatives are not up to you either. (See the Introduction to A Course in Miracles below).
The power to choose is meaningless unless you know what you are choosing between. The alternatives can be expressed in different ways: dreaming or waking; fear or love; illusion or truth; death or life. The choice is always the same: to place your mind under the true Authority or the tyranny of the ego.
The purpose of every lesson is to make the alternatives clear to you so you can make the better choice.
Introduction to A Course in Miracles
“This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean that you can establish the curriculum. It means only that you can elect what you want to take at a given time. The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.
This course can therefore be summed up very simply in this way:
“Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.”
Musings: The Abundance of God
“Whatever suffers is not part of me.”
– ACIM Workbook Lesson 248
c
No matter what befalls you in life: sickness, poverty, aloneness, abandonment, betrayal—you cannot suffer because love accompanies you. Love is total. If there is suffering, there is not love. If there is love, there can be no suffering.
Most activity in life is dedicated to avoiding suffering.
We don’t understand that suffering is a choice in the mind. There is only one way to become truly comfortable and that is to look upon our grievances and forgive them.
When things aren’t working, the place to look for the cause is in the mind. What is the grievance; who is to blame?
Let go of all grievances, and you cannot suffer under any circumstances. What suffers is not a part of you, because you are part of God. Forgiveness teaches this.
You could be blind and you would still “see.”
The body could fail and you would feel strong.
You could be betrayed and you would know you are loved.
Musings: The Difference between Translation and Interpretation
“A good translator, although he must alter the form of what he translates, never changes the meaning. In fact, his whole purpose is to change the form so that the original meaning is retained.” T-7. II.4:3-4
Once a week I used to have the delightful opportunity to read for a blind man. Robert, a seeker of truth since his early 20’s, was then 86. His most prized possession was a library containing the works of the world’s greatest mystics, theologians, philosophers, and teachers.
At my first meeting with Robert he asked me to find and read from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. It was a well used book with sections underlined and margins marked with comments and questions. (In the months that followed, I found that to be true of most of the books in this library.)
Never having read Marcus Aurelius, I was surprised to learn the great Roman Emperor spoke the language of choice and mind training that had become so familiar to me in A Course in Miracles. I understood him perfectly and soon the three of us—Marcus, Robert, and I—were sharing the same transcendent country in the mind.
Months later, after many reading sessions with Marcus and Robert, I decided I had to have a copy of Meditations to add to my library. Amazon had several translations, and not finding any comments that set one apart from another, I chose one for no particular reason.
When my copy arrived I took the first opportunity I had to settle into my reading chair and began. After a few paragraphs I started to feel something was missing. The words seemed similar but they did not take me to same place of communion with the great mind of the Emperor.
The next time I read for Robert, I took my book and compared the same section in Robert’s translation. Some of the words were the same, many were different, but the meaning was alive in Robert’s translation and not in mine. Having learned the value of a good translation I sent my copy back to Amazon.
When A Course in Miracles came into my life back in 1976 there were no study groups, no interpreters, and no translators (that I knew of), and there were many times when I did not understand what I was reading. On those occasions I would ask Jesus or the Holy Spirit to help me and somewhere during the events of the day the meaning would be made perfectly clear.
As a result of this learning process, I developed an intimate relationship with the course Teachers (Jesus and the Holy Spirit) and understanding that did not involve interpretation. The experience was that of being in their mind or “going to their country”. It is the same experience I shared with Robert while reading Marcus Aurelius.
When a message—it could be music, poetry, art, literature—is coming from out of time, it has the capacity to take us to where that work is coming from. It is a transcendent experience—a gift from Heaven that touches us for a moment takes us home. A Course in Miracles is that for me.
A translation that conveys the original meaning of a precious work of art can only be done by someone who has joined the author in his country and has understood the meaning of the message without interpretation. The form may be changed—different words, different language—but the content remains the same. This is crucial. If that is not the case the translation will miss the mark intended by the original.
I find Ken Wapnick to be a superb translator of A Course in Miracles. He adds his words to help students understand some of the complex material of the Course. But he does not change the meaning. Presently he is the only translator of the Course that I recommend to students.
Accepting A Course in Miracles as a path of awakening means joining Jesus and the Holy Spirit in their country (the mind), not trying to bring them here. What I find in much of the supporting material on the subject of A Course in Miracles is that it often (and very subtly) brings Jesus and the Holy Spirit into this world. When this occurs the ego has gotten involved in interpretation and is twisting the original message of the course to suit its purposes of self preservation. The effect of this effort is to keep us from joining Jesus and the Holy Spirit where they are.
If you want to experience a foreign country the only way to really do that is to go there. Reality—a shared experience of the mind—is a foreign country for those of us who believe we are bodies living in a world. The purpose of A Course in Miracles is to shift our identity from the body to the mind. That is a miracle.
Musings: Self Sabotaging Behavior
Once we heed the call to wake up from the ego thought system we begin to see the world differently.
It becomes a classroom in which everything can be used to learn to make a different choice that will lead us out of the dream of separation instead of deeper into it.
Until we understand what we are choosing between, choice is meaningless. We but choose among illusions, which can hardly be called a choice.
“There is a choice that you have the power to make when you have seen the real alternative. Until that point is reached you have no choice, and you can but decide the better to deceive yourself again.”
Self sabotaging behavior is behavior that we know is not in our best interest, yet we do it anyway.
We eat foods that hurt us. We drive people away with behaviors that cause them difficulty. We spend our time doing things that we don’t even respect. We don’t exercise when we know that we should. We drink too much, spend more than we have, smoke, gamble, and generally overindulge.
Self sabotage is a classroom that most of us share. Fortunately, it provides an excellent opportunity for changing our minds because we are aware of our need for change every time we indulge. And we are convinced it is the behavior that needs to change.
The School for A Course in Miracles offers another alternative to trying to change behavior. All our do’s and dont’s can be see as a reflection of a choice in our minds. Which teacher are we running with, the ego or the Holy Spirit?
Self sabotaging behavior is always one of the SFACIM subjects, viewed from the perspective of A Course in Miracles.
Musings : What a Friend We Have in Jesus
The title for this post is taken from a hymn that I remember singing as a little girl when I went to Methodist church with my mother. I remember standing tall and singing out with all my heart as I imagined he and I walking together. Fortunately, Jesus was portrayed as a friend by the Methodists, and this friendship came back to me some 40 years later when the Course entered my life.
The Course is not presenting us with abstract metaphysical truths. It is something we need to live every day and our relationship with Jesus is fundamental to our education. By healing our relationship with him we learn how to forgive the world and remember God. We cannot do it ourselves. Our egos do not understand “both” and “together”. If we are doing Jesus’ Course, he is the one that is going to show us what those words mean. In joining him we take our first step toward oneness.
Loving relationships exist and are only possible in the mind. We don’t believe that. Jesus has to convince us that we would be better off if we did believe it. He believes in us and we don’t. He wants us to have everything and be free and experience that God’s will for us is perfect happiness. We don’t want that for ourselves. He shows us very respectfully why we don’t and then he helps us undo the obstacles to happiness.
Joining with Jesus is establishing a loving a relationship in our minds, beyond time and space (but truly there). He tells us he “will be there”, and he is. But we have to go to him. He knows there is no body so how can he come to it. We have to learn to find our mind and join him there. Do you know you have a mind? Do you know how to use it? Do you know what it is for? Joining with Jesus is a step in learning that everything is in our mind. Peace is there. Love is there. It is God’s Home and our home.
The process of returning to our mind is what A Course in Miracles calls a miracle. It is the only thing that will ever make a difference in our lives. It is a gradual process because it teaches us we are minds, not bodies. There never was a body. Our definition of our personal selves is at stake.
Jesus has the job (at least for those who take A Course in Miracles as their path) of leading us home. How did he land that job you might ask?
When the One Son of God had the “tiny mad idea” of separating from God and running away from home, one tiny corner of our mind did not go along with the idea. It smiled kindly and said “no” to it. It stayed home with Love Itself. That aspect of our mind is symbolized by Jesus. He still remains within our minds, waiting for us to choose him by joining his decision to stay at home.
He is the one who says, “We go together, you and I”.
What a friend we have in Jesus!
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