Musings : “I need devoted teachers…”
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: 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 : 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!