Reflections 309 to 322
30th May 2024
Its separate goals become quite clear in this, for it has not removed the curse of sin that lies on it. Therefore it still deceives. (ACIM, S-3.III.1:2-3)
***
Ref: To perceive truly is to be aware of all reality through the awareness of your own. But for this no illusions can rise to meet your sight, for reality leaves no room for any error. (ACIM, T-13.VI.1:1-2)
A Course in Miracles tells us that if we remember the past, then it is impossible to know what is now. Present moment awareness just disappears and is replaced by a veil.
Within the split mind is darkness as well as light, and this is duality. We therefore seem to have two reference points. One is the ego and the other is the Holy Spirit.
The ego uses judgement which arises out of past experience. The ego never sees anything exactly as it is. If we saw something in the now, we are looking with the Holy Spirit which has no opposite.
Time is therefore the great illusion that can release as well as imprison. This is why the practice of forgiveness so important. Forgiveness is the key that releases the mind from the grip of the past.
Forgiveness allows the miracle, and the miracle is the light that undoes the illusion of separation.
When judgement and condemnation leave the mind, then the ego also has to go. Darkness just disappears. What we now do is forget the past and know the present, which is joy instead of dread.
Cate Grieves begins the first of her teachings on the Song of Prayer. She says that any problem we have is always the perception of the ego, and that each step we take to know this is another move away from the ego’s darkness. By undoing fear, we find that perfect love is with us all of the time.
____________________________________________________________________________
310/ Essence of Life
31st May 2024
Nor is it made by one who understands the other is exactly like himself. For it is this that makes true healing possible. (ACIM, S-3.III.1:4-5)
***
Ref: The end is sure and guaranteed by God. Who stands before a lifeless image when a step away the Holy of the Holies opens up an ancient door that leads beyond the world? (ACIM, C-ep.1:10-11)
Once the journey is begun, the end is certain.
We are strangers here, of this there is no question.
Don’t be afraid, we have a Friend who can lead the way.
What is written above is from the epilogue of the Manual for Teachers. It is really telling us that the practice of A Course in Miracles might at times feel challenging but it is worth pursuing to the end.
The epilogue also mentions Christ being reborn into the world. This is a metaphor for knowing our Self. We are always one with God and complete in Heaven.
Oneness never changes. Only in dreams can Heaven be forgotten. Oneness returns the moment we remember that we are dreaming.
A Course in Miracles returns us back to peace. It gives us a theoretical overview and a practical application. The Manual for Teachers simply expands on the Text and the Workbook.
To know complete peace requires commitment. We have to face our fears and start living life.
We have to learn to be still. This means returning home and discovering that we have never left.
____________________________________________________________________________
311/ Love Is Everything
1st June 2024
When false, there is some power that another has, not equally bestowed on both as one. Here is the separation shown. And here the meaning of true healing has been lost, and idols have arisen to obscure the unity that is the Son of God. (ACIM, S-3.III.1:6-8)
***
Ref: Love is not an illusion. It is a fact. Where disillusionment is possible, there was not love but hate. For hate is an illusion, and what can change was never love. (ACIM, T-16.IV.4:1-4)
A Course in Miracles tells us it is not our task to seek externally for love. We only need to remove all the blocks within us that prevents love’s presence.
We also learn that, by seeking outside of ourselves for love, it is guaranteed that we still have hatred within our minds.
And the peace within us can never arise from the illusion of love; it only arises from love’s reality.
A Course in Miracles asks us whether we are willing to go through fear to love? This is the question that we need to consider if we are ever going to awaken from the dream.
It means drawing a line in the sand. We need to look at all of our darkness and not flinch. This might appear to be a difficult decision to make but, in reality, it is more than easy.
We have to be calm when the wolf comes to the door. We mustn’t flinch at our own shortcomings. Instead, we just want to drop into our own beingness.
The Holy Spirit is the silence and stillness within our minds, and this is where we have to go. We only find peace when we drop into love’s presence, and it is in love’s presence that we find the light.
We bring all of our darkness to the light. Love is everything and what is its opposite does not exist.
2nd June 2024
Healing-to-separate may seem to be a strange idea. And yet it can be said of any form of healing that is based on inequality of any kind. (ACIM, S-3.III.2:1-2)
***
Ref: The prayer for things of this world will bring experiences of this world. If the prayer of the heart asks for this, this will be given because this will be received. (ACIM, M-21.3:1-2)
We have no idea what healing is. We probably think it results in the body’s fitness but it is so much more than that.
Likewise, we might think that prayer comes from a body to a deity, and that the deity has some sort of control over that body. Nothing could be further from the truth.
True healing is always of the mind. It means we only feel peaceful because there is only peace.
True prayer arises in a song. The song is giving thanks to the Father and the Father is giving thanks back to the Son Who sings the song. Love flows freely and extends itself, which is what creation is.
Our goal, then, is to release our fear (the ego) and find the peace (the Holy Spirit). As the mind heals, the song of prayer just arises naturally and spontaneously.
A Course in Miracles keeps reminding us that our thoughts are our prayers. Each one of us is responsible for the thoughts we think. In fact, we are what we think.
Forgiveness is therefore the link that joins the chain. We forgive ourselves of what we have never done and the healed mind reconnects to its Source. Prayer becomes gratitude.
Ultimately, life is gratitude. Life is just a continuous flow of love. The mind that is healed knows this completely and the mind that is split only guesses but hasn’t got a clue.
____________________________________________________________________________
313/ One with Love
3rd June 2024
These forms may heal the body, and indeed are generally limited to this. Someone knows better, has been better trained, or is perhaps more talented and wise. Therefore, he can give healing to the one who stands beneath him in his patronage. (ACIM, S-3.III.2:3-5)
***
Ref: The only way to heal is to be healed. The miracle extends without your help, but you are needed that it can begin. Accept the miracle of healing, and it will go forth because of what it is. (ACIM, T-27.V.1:1-3)
We need to heal in order to become the whole. A healed mind offers healing to others.
In the same way, the Holy Spirit only speaks to the one mind. There are no individuals. It is through the listening that His Voice extends.
To be healed means letting go of fear. Fear and love are opposites. Fear means the ego is talking and healing means the ego has lost its voice.
A Course in Miracles tells us that, when healed, conflict hasn’t necessarily disappeared from the mind. Instead, if only for an instant, we can love and not attack.
And the holy instant is all there is. There is only now and it is within the now that the miracle lies.
The miracle doesn’t wait on time. Each time that a miracle comes our way, it rises up through the cessation of time.
This is when we step into our own beingness. The miracle happens when we are not trying to control the situation. We just become part of the stillness and not part of the noise.
The mind is living within the Mind of God. To heal the mind is to know that we are one with Love.
____________________________________________________________________________
314/ Love and Fear
4th June 2024
The healing of the body can be done by this because, in dreams, equality cannot be permanent. The shifts and change are what the dream is made of. To be healed appears to be to find a wiser one who, by his arts and learning, will succeed. (ACIM, S-3.III.2:6-8)
***
Ref: When the ego tempts you to sickness do not ask the Holy Spirit to heal the body, for this would merely be to accept the ego’s belief that the body is the proper aim of healing. Ask, rather, that the Holy Spirit teach you the right perception of the body, for perception alone can be distorted. (ACIM, T-8.IX.1:5-6)
Everything we see reflects our own inner state. What is within is being projected outwards.
Equally, as we fall asleep at night, our inner world rises to meet us. A dream arises within the dream.
A Course in Miracles reminds us that projection makes perception. The world is an outward picture of an inward condition. Consequently, all we are asked to do is to change our minds about the world.
Perception is a result and not a cause. Perception arises either out of fear or love, because love and fear are the only two states that a split mind can feel. When the mind is healed, only love is known.
Fear appears to be very real. It lurks behind every corner and never seems to be completely hidden. It is the cause of nightmares and is the driving force behind every decision that we ever make.
Love seems fleeting. We grasp at it endlessly and turn it into a form that we can use (coffee, cake, alcohol, cars). Love is not connected to God because God is too abstract and can’t be seen.
To know love, we have to face our fears; however, to know fear simply means we have rejected love.
Only love can bring us back to love. Love has no opposite. Love, not fear, is calling out to be known.
____________________________________________________________________________
315/ Taking off the Shoe
5th June 2024
Someone knows better; this the magic phrase by which the body seems to be the aim of healing as the world conceives of it. And to this wiser one another goes to profit by his learning and his skill; to find in him the remedy for pain. How can that be? (ACIM, S-3.III.3:1-3)
***
Ref: There is one thought in particular that should be remembered throughout the day. It is a thought of pure joy; a thought of peace, a thought of limitless release, limitless because all things are freed within it. (ACIM, M-16.6:1-2)
A Course in Miracles reminds us that our defences will disappear if we give them up. It’s the same as taking off a shoe to find the foot.
What the shoe is hiding is absolute truth. This is our true Self. It is the complete picture of what we are with no limits or imperfection of any kind.
As stated above, there is always someone who knows better. Fears tend to recede with the hope.
Healing, however, only happens when two minds join. Suffering arises from a belief in separation and the ego is the result. Fear is the cause and its effect is hate.
Anyone that we do not like is a manifestation of our own inner hatred. Self-hatred blots out the truth like the shutters on a window block out the light.
Within every one of us is the solution. We all have a Guide that has no opposite and needs no defence. It is a single Voice that speaks to us of liberty and freedom, joy and peace.
Forgiveness finds us this Guide. The shutter opens and we see a world that reflects our inner peace.
All our defences then come tumbling down. It’s as if the shoe is removed and we become the foot.
____________________________________________________________________________
316/ Friends not Foes
6th June 2024
True healing cannot come from inequality assumed and then accepted as the truth, and used to help restore the wounded and to calm the mind that suffers from the agony of doubt. (ACIM, S-3.III.3:4)
***
Ref: Healing is a thought by which two minds perceive their oneness and become glad. This gladness calls to every part of the Sonship to rejoice with them, and lets God go out into them and through them. (ACIM, T-5.I.1:1-2)
Our minds seem to be conditioned into fearful thinking. We believe that one person is our friend and another is our enemy.
To undo the belief in an ‘enemy’ is the whole context for A Course in Miracles. It states that there are no enemies anywhere. Love just increases and everything else is false.
The ego is our ‘enemy’. It is by challenging our belief in the ego that it loses its power. And it is because the ego make us feel powerless that we see the enemies everywhere.
Belief in enemies is undone through forgiveness. It is forgiveness that removes the blocks to love.
It’s as if we look up at the sky and see eternity. Infinity is stretching away right before our eyes.
And so it is when the mind is healed. Peace just rises. Without the ego, we have friends, not foes.
Cate Grieves takes another look at the Song of Prayer and says that we are all here to undo the false beliefs that make us fearful. We live our lives as a prayer, in that our thoughts are the prayer. It is only forgiveness that changes our fearful thinking into loving thoughts, and makes us wholly one.
____________________________________________________________________________
317/ All Minds Are One
7th June 2024
Is there a role for healing, then, that one can use to offer help for someone else? In arrogance the answer must be “no.” But in humility there is indeed a place for helpers. (ACIM, S-3.III.4:1-3)
***
Ref: Think carefully, teacher and therapist, for whom you pray, and who is in need of healing. For therapy is prayer, and healing is its aim and its result. (ACIM, P-2.VII.2:1-2)
A Course in Miracles states that psychotherapy is the only therapy there is. Any relationship that we enter into is either one of separation or one of joining.
Equally, we are also told that all healing is of God, and God asks for nothing. Instead of analysing the ego, we need to see that what is within us is perfect. God’s Love has no conditions.
Consequently, when two people form a relationship, even as a therapist and patient, the purpose is always to see the other as God would see us. As we give love out, so it increases within ourselves.
Only the ego divides and separates. Every relationship that the ego is involved in uses judgement to set its parameters. Conditions have to be met and desires need to be satisfied.
Who, then, is the therapist and who is the patient? This is a question that needs to be asked.
A Course in Miracles tells us that no one ever crosses our path by chance. Everyone we meet is always brought to us for a purpose.
The whole point of any relationship is to know that we are whole and holy. There is just one mind, not many minds, and the one mind is complete within the Mind of God.
As we let go of judgement and we begin to love our brother, we become both patient and therapist. No one is less and no one is more. Indeed, as two minds join, it’s easy to see that all minds are one.
____________________________________________________________________________
318/ Reality as it Is
8th June 2024
It is like the role that helps in prayer, and lets forgiveness be what it is meant to be. You do not make yourself the bearer of the special gift that brings the healing. You but recognize your oneness with the one who calls for help. For in this oneness is his separate sense dispelled, and it is this that made him sick. (ACIM, S-3.III.4:4-7)
***
Ref: Appearances deceive, but can be changed. Reality is changeless. It does not deceive at all, and if you fail to see beyond appearances you are deceived. For everything you see will change, and yet you thought it real before, and now you think it real again. (ACIM, T-30.VIII.1:1-4)
A Course in Miracles tells us that reality is unlike anything we see in the world. It transcends form to be itself. Reality is without an opposite.
To know reality, we begin with the miracle. If we have unease, then the miracle dismisses that unease; if we are addicted, then the miracle undoes that addiction. Likewise with any form of need.
Reality only appears after a complete change of mind. It means we stop thinking in a way that is painful and start thinking in a way that is loving.
It is forgiveness that allows this. Forgiveness returns us to a peace that surpasses all understanding. It is a peace that is beyond words and cannot be described.
Forgiveness also means facing our fears and handing them over to the Holy Spirit. This is the same as saying we bring all of our darkness to the light and all of our non-peace to the peace.
We might think that love moves in mysterious ways but A Course in Miracles reminds us that it doesn’t. Love is reality and reality is love. Love is exactly what we are.
Reality is simply there for those who seek it. We don’t need to beat ourselves up for not knowing this but we do have to forgive ourselves each time we slip up.
____________________________________________________________________________
319/ Salvation’s Cure
9th June 2024
There is no point in giving remedy apart from where the source of sickness is, for never thus can it be truly healed. (ACIM, S-3.III.4:8)
***
Ref: “Cure” is a word that cannot be applied to any remedy the world accepts as beneficial. What the world perceives as therapeutic is but what will make the body “better.” (ACIM, W-140.1:1-2)
The world does not see the mind as separate from the body. The world believes that the mind is within the body and is directly related to the brain.
A Course in Miracles is a complete reversal of this thinking. It tells us that the body is an image in the mind. We can’t “cure” the body but we can “heal” the mind.
Within this context, then, the mind is sick and needs attention. Nothing in the world can do this for us. And neither can anything in A Course in Miracles meet our needs unless we apply ourselves to it.
We are like an iceberg floating in the ocean. We see what’s on the surface but there is a huge part of the iceberg that we cannot see. What is beneath the surface is totally hidden from our awareness.
A Course in Miracles is not interested in the physical form of anything. It only shows us what is real and provides the remedy so that we can find it.
The world has its own method of forgiveness but A Course in Miracles teaches forgiveness-for-salvation. The lesson referred to at the start states that only salvation can be said to “cure”.
The cure is when the split mind becomes one mind. Fear disappears and only love becomes known.
Salvation therefore attests that we are one with God. We are not the tip of the iceberg and we are not its base. We are the ocean itself and can’t be anything else.
____________________________________________________________________________
320/ Presence of Love
10th June 2024
Healers there are, for they are Sons of God who recognize their Source, and understand that all their Source creates is one with them. This is the remedy that brings relief which cannot fail. It will remain to bless for all eternity. It heals no part, but wholly and forever. (ACIM, S-3.III.5:1-4)
***
Ref: Be not afraid. We only start again an ancient journey long ago begun that but seems new. We have begun again upon a road we travelled on before and lost our way a little while. And now we try again. (ACIM, C-ep.3:1-4)
Love’s presence is all there is. This is the miracle and the only one to which we should aspire.
Equally, there is no order of difficulty in miracles. Nothing is harder to overcome than anything else. All we ever have is either love’s presence or a veil that blots it out.
A Course in Miracles asks us not to be afraid. It wants us to recognize our Source. It tells us that we aren’t this vulnerable, little body but absolute Spirit without an opposite.
To know this fully requires relinquishing fear. It means getting to the depths of our unconscious mind and witnessing it with stillness. It means looking at our deepest fear which is the fear of God.
The fear of God crucifies us. It keeps us in darkness, which is hell. We try to avoid its effects as much as possible but nothing can suppress what is always there.
The simple truth is that, without this fear, we would remember the Father. It is only by removing this block to love that His memory can return.
Being in hell is painful but being in Heaven is bliss. It’s clear that we can only be in one or the other.
And forgiveness brings us Heaven. It gives us both the presence of love and also the song of prayer.
____________________________________________________________________________
321/ Two Sources
11th June 2024
Now the cause of every malady has been revealed exactly as it is. And in that place is written now the holy Word of God. (ACIM, S-3.III.5:5-6)
***
Ref: Communion is impossible alone. No one who stands apart can receive Christ’s vision. It is held out to him, but he cannot hold out his hand to receive it. Let him be still and recognize his brother’s need is his own. (ACIM, P-2.II.9:1-4)
We have a source of fear and a Source of Love. A Course in Miracles states that only one is real.
The source of fear is the ego. It is a tiny, isolated voice that speaks to us all the time. It never stops. It pervades our dreams at night and fuels the dreams of the day. It seems real but is not real at all.
The ego wants us to be powerful but also powerless. It expects us to be independent but afraid to leave the life that we have made. It pretends to protect us but actually hates us and wants us dead.
Love, according to the ego, always has to be reciprocated. It has to have a return. Fear appears to be love’s opposite, and fear is the ego. The ego dresses up as love but is simply just disguised.
The Source of Love is always God. Nothing about God is ever complicated or out of place. God communicates to us through the Holy Spirit and only stillness allows Him to be heard.
If our Source is God, then we are powerful beyond measure. We are God’s Son having a dream of being something else. Everything we think is real is nothing more than an aberration in the mind.
God is Love and the means by which we exist. The ego is just a false belief we are something else.
If we replace the source with the Source, then we are healed. The mind is exactly as it is, not how we would wish it to be. There is only the one Son, and it is this that makes us whole and fully healed.
____________________________________________________________________________
322/ Illusions to Truth
12th June 2024
Sickness and separation must be healed by love and union. Nothing else can heal as God established healing. Without Him there is no healing, for there is no love. (ACIM, S-3.III.5:7-9)
***
Ref: Illness of any kind may be defined as the result of a view of the self as weak, vulnerable, evil and endangered, and thus in need of constant defense. Yet if such were really the self, defense would be impossible. (ACIM, P-2.IV.6:1-2)
A Course in Miracles tells us that we accept error as real and we deal with it through illusions. This is the reality of life in a body.
We bring truth to illusions and perceive God as being evil. This is the fault that we carry in the mind.
Because of this, life has become the wrong way round. We consider the body that we are as being real and the spiritual Self as the mistake. The only correction needed is to reverse our thinking.
We are asked to look past the darkness that confines us to the body. We look to a light that can only be seen by a mind that is joined with the Holy Spirit.
It is the same as saying that form disappears as we merge with the formless. One negates the other.
As stated above, sickness and separation are healed by love and union. We bring the error in the mind (the ego) to the truth in the mind (the Holy Spirit). Only then can the mind be fully healed.
If the self is vulnerable and afraid, it needs to be dressed up in a suit of armour. The Self, however, is all-knowing and wise, and needs no defence. We leave the suffering to where there is no suffering.
Healing simply means we look at all our non-peace and let it dissolve into the peace. We sort out what is wrong from what is right and simply bring illusions to the truth.
Comments
Post a Comment