Reflections 337 to 350
337/ Whole and Perfect
27th June 2024
Think what it means to help the Christ to heal! Can anything be holier than this? (ACIM, S-3.IV.3:1-2)
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Ref: As you can hear two voices, so you can see in two ways. One way shows you an image, or an idol that you may worship out of fear, but will never love. The other shows you only truth, which you will love because you will understand it. (ACIM, T-7.V.9:1-3)
A Course in Miracles states that God created us with love, appreciation and understanding. These are the qualities that we need to adopt for ourselves.
Jesus is part of us and we are part of him. There is only one mind and the one mind fully knows the truth of how we were created.
The ego is this intense fear that tells us that Jesus suffered. He died for our sins. The ego is a thought that we are not worthy and will be damned if we ever think we are the Son of God.
A Course in Miracles was scribed by inner dictation and has the words of Jesus written all over it. It tells us that death is the symbol of the ego. Only true forgiveness returns us back to God.
True forgiveness forms the foundation for all our learning. It wakes us up to what we really are.
And love, appreciation and understanding all arise as we do this. This is really the song of prayer.
Cate Grieves continues with the Song of Prayer and begins the second section on forgiveness. She tells us that practising forgiveness might be equated to being in a darkened room, then switching on a light. As we undo the ego, what is whole and perfect has to replace the thoughts of hell we share.
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338/ Inner Stillness
28th June 2024
God thanks His healers, for He knows the Cause of healing is Himself, His Love, His Son, restored as His completion and returned to share with Him creation’s holy joy. (ACIM, S-3.IV.3:3)
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Ref: Forgiveness is the final goal of the curriculum. It paves the way for what goes far beyond all learning. The curriculum makes no effort to exceed its legitimate goal. Forgiveness is its single aim, at which all learning ultimately converges. (ACIM, M-4.X.2:9-12)
The Cause of healing is the Father; conversely, the cause of suffering is the ego.
The mind appears to be at a crossroads and is dithering about which way to go. The choice is simple. We can either move towards healing or away from it.
It’s as if we are blindfolded. There’s a sign post for directions but we can’t see it. We are suffering but it is hard to believe our suffering is self-imposed.
A Course in Miracles is one way to remove the blindfold and make the decision - but only if we practice the workbook. It is a course in mind training and only the practice can bring us peace.
For example, whenever we do not feel peaceful, then we are thinking with the ego. We can’t heal the ego but we can choose against it, and we do this by choosing the miracle instead.
The purpose of mind training is to be in the right mind. This is the Holy Spirit. The right mind is an inner stillness of which we are hardly ever aware.
And forgiveness means we drop into our inner stillness and do nothing. Forgiveness shows us there are no crossroads. Forgiveness removes the blindfold so that we can clearly see.
We return to our Cause by undoing the cause. Only inner stillness allows the mind to completely be.
339/ Questions and Answers
29th June 2024
Do not ask partial healing, nor accept an idol for rememberance of Him Whose Love has never changed and never will. (ACIM, S-3.IV.3:4)
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Ref: As the teacher of God advances in his training, he learns one lesson with increasing thoroughness. He does not make his own decisions; he asks his Teacher for His answer, and it is this he follows as his guide for action. (ACIM, M-9.2:1-2)
Partial healing is an oxymoron. We are either healed totally or not at all.
An idol is any thought that blocks the Thought of God. It could be that we are desperate for a cup of tea instead of Love’s Presence. It is as simple as that.
The mind is either healed or it is not healed; it is either fully aware of God or it is not. There are no half measures in this.
The belief that we are a body proves that the mind is not healed. We believe we are walking, talking individuals who are on their own. Nothing could be further from the truth.
A Course in Miracles states that we are God’s Son. We are just dreaming that we are separate and apart. It is like a living nightmare and the only way to end this dream of hell is through forgiveness.
Forgiveness undoes the blocks to Love’s Presence. That is why, as stated above, a teacher of God has to ask the Holy Spirit about everything. If we refer to the ego, we always get the wrong answer.
Really, though, there are no questions and there are no answers. Everything is perfect as it is.
We are the Son of God having a dream of separation. Questions and answers are superfluous because God provided the mind with the Answer as soon as the question was thought.
30th June 2024
You are as dear to Him as is the whole of His creation, for it lies in you as His eternal gift. What need have you for shifting dreams within a sorry world? (ACIM, S-3.IV.3:5-6)
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Ref: The body can bring you neither peace nor turmoil; neither joy nor pain. It is a means, and not an end. It has no purpose of itself, but only what is given to it. The body will seem to be whatever is the means for reaching the goal that you assign to it. (ACIM, T-19.IV-B.10:4-7)
The Holy Spirit is our only hope.
Quite simply, A Course in Miracles states that it is impossible to seek for pleasure through the body, and not to feel the pain.
The body transmits only what we desire and it all comes to us through the mind. The ego and the Holy Spirit both fully understand this and both use the body for their respective goals.
The ego actually is the body. The ego’s moods vary, sometimes loving and sometimes not. The ego always uses pain as a means of control and believes that pleasure only lies out in the world.
The Holy simply sees the body as a way of communicating peace. It is as simple as that.
The purpose of A Course in Miracles is to give the Holy Spirit all our pain and to receive from Him all His peace instead. This is the same as saying we bring the darkness to the light.
What happens if we don’t do this is that we manufacture more pain and become frozen into the belief that we are unable to do anything. We have become the puppet of the ego.
The sender and receiver are the same. When we use pain to hurt, we only hurt ourselves; when we use peace to heal, we heal ourselves. What we do to others is ALWAYS what we do to ourselves.
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341/ Oneness with God
1st July 2024
Do not forget the gratitude of God. Do not forget the holy grace of prayer. Do not forget forgiveness of God’s Son. (ACIM, S-3.IV.3:7-9)
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Ref: Healing is the change of mind that the Holy Spirit in the patient’s mind is seeking for him. And it is the Holy Spirit in the mind of the giver Who gives the gift to him. How can it be lost? How can it be ineffectual? How can it be wasted? (ACIM, M-6.4:3-7)
A Course in Miracles reminds us that true prayer asks for nothing. Nothing is needed because nothing is wanted. God’s Son has everything.
We are that Son and we are merely dreaming that we are not.
We, as bodies, pray unceasingly. All our thoughts are a prayer. We worry, we plead, we demand, and all because we do not know what we are.
As implied at the top of the page, we come back to the memory of who we are through the forgiveness of God’s Son. We do this by getting to know the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is the echo of God’s Voice. When we join with another in prayer, we are likely to be asking for something - anything. What we don’t know is that true prayer is just a song of gratitude.
Everyone has the Holy Spirit in their mind, from the most loving to the most hateful person we know, and this is because the one mind is split between knowing God and not knowing God.
Only we can choose if we want to know God and we do this by opting for peace without exception.
True prayer is therefore the song we sing with the Father. It the only thing we can ever know and the only thing there ever IS. True prayer is a celebration of our oneness with God.
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342/ Formless Prayer
2nd July 2024
You first forgive, then pray, and you are healed. (ACIM, S-3.IV.4:1)
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Ref: Wisdom is not judgment; it is the relinquishment of judgment. (ACIM, M-10.4:5)
A Course in Miracles tells us that prayer has no beginning and no end.
We either pray out of need or we pray out of a deep sense of gratitude. This means our prayers either have form or they are formless.
Anything to do with form has nothing to do with God. Form is based on fear and cannot possibly arise out of the formless nature of God’s eternal Love.
Prayer is a ladder reaching up to Heaven. While we are on the bottom rung of the ladder, or any rung in between, we exist as form. We either pray out of a belief in scarcity or a belief in abundance.
The ego is that scarcity and the Holy Spirit is the abundance.
The irony is that the ego judges scarcity as bad and abundance as good. As we stop all judgement, we stop the ego and this is how we find the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit knows our needs. The Holy Spirit is a quiet joy that knows every aspect of our past, present and future, and exactly how each one of us gets to the top of the ladder.
The Holy Spirit simply requires us to be quiet and just be. Beingness has no judgement.
Formless prayer becomes a part of love. It is the song that is sung by the Son and the Father. Formless prayer is expressed in the quiet moment as we finally step off the top rung of the ladder.
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343/ Love and Share
3rd July 2024
Your prayer has risen up and called to God, Who hears and answers. You have understood that you forgive and pray but for yourself. And in this understanding you are healed. (ACIM, S-3.IV.4:2-4)
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Ref: God’s teachers appear to be many, for that is what is the world’s need. Yet being joined in one purpose, and one they share with God, how could they be separate from each other? What does it matter if they then appear in many forms? Their minds are one; their joining is complete. (ACIM, M-12.2:5-8)
A Course in Miracles tells us that to love ourselves is to heal ourselves. It states that it is impossible to perceive part of the mind as being sick and to achieve this goal.
Therefore, what we ask for is what we receive. If we ask for pain, then it is guaranteed that pain is what we get.
As long as there is a belief that one is many, then problems arise.
And the solution is always within us. We need to look deeply into what we fear.
This is why the Song of Prayer tells us that we forgive and pray simply for ourselves; it is why the Manual for Teachers states that all of God’s teachers are really just the one Teacher within us all.
The fact is, there is no plural. There is just the one mind pretending to be many.
The belief that we are somehow apart and vulnerable is a major cause of suffering. The way out of this suffering is to change our beliefs about what we think.
The way out is to go within. Within us all is truth, peace and understanding. Instead of going to the ego for a solution, we go to the Holy Spirit and this is how we come to love and share.
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344/ Caught in a Loop
4th July 2024
In prayer you have united with your Source, and understood that you have never left. (ACIM, S-3.IV.4:5)
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Ref: You will remember everything the instant you desire it wholly, for if to desire wholly is to create, you will have willed away the separation, returning your mind simultaneously to your Creator and your creations. (ACIM, T-10.I.4:1)
A Course in Miracles states that we are at home in God and dreaming of exile. It is reminding us that we are perfectly capable of awakening to reality.
Reality is the here-and-now and it is this that we assiduously avoid.
We are actually asleep but find it impossible to remember being awake. Our dreams at night are just a shift from all our daytime dreams.
The eternal is always now, and so all we have to do is to become aware of the present moment.
It is forgiveness that starts the process of undoing, enabling us to to awaken to our true reality. The mind is transformed in a way that the world can never understand.
The world merely shows us that we are caught in a loop. Only we can step off this cycle of despair.
Cate Grieves looks at forgiveness-to-destroy in the sixth instalment of the Song of Prayer. She says that the ego damns instead of heals and we need to see through its facade of authority. This means that, instead of believing in the ego, our goal is to awaken to our true Self which is the Peace of God.
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345/ A Better Way
5th July 2024
This level cannot be attained until there is no hatred in your heart, and no desire to attack the Son of God. (ACIM, S-3.IV.4:6)
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Ref: God’s teachers can have no regret on giving up the pleasures of the world. Is it a sacrifice to give up pain? Does an adult resent the giving up of children’s toys? Does one whose vision has already glimpsed the face of Christ look back with longing on a slaughter house? (ACIM, M-13.4:1-4)
“There has to be a better way.”
When these words were spoken by Bill Thetford to Helen Schucman in 1965, it gave permission for the universe to do something.
Their relationship stopped being ‘special’ and became ‘holy’. It became a relationship through which the Holy Spirit could work.
The words came through, were written down, and the whole process took seven years to complete.
And so A Course in Miracles came about.
Helen Schucman did not practice any of the teachings during her lifetime; Bill Thetford did. It has been recorded that he was literally dancing with joy just minutes before he died in 1988.
The point is that it is only by embodying A Course in Miracles that we find the healing.
The world is seen differently. It is seen through the lens of love and not the lens of fear.
We are choosing to see peace instead of pain, meaning the ‘better way’ has healed the mind.
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346/ Ceaseless Singing
6th July 2024
Never forget this; it is you who are God’s Son, and as you choose to be to him so are you to yourself, and God to you. Nor will your judgment fail to reach to God, for you will give the role to Him you see in His creation. (ACIM, S-3.IV.5:1-2)
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Ref: Neither justice nor injustice exists in Heaven, for error is impossible and correction meaningless. In this world, however, forgiveness depends on justice, since all attack can only be unjust. (ACIM, M-19.1:4-5)
A Course in Miracles asks us to sing the ceaseless song that all creation sings unto its God. It is a song of pure joy and endless love.
We do not hear the song because we choose to listen to the voice of the ego instead.
A Course in Miracles asks that we don’t make the error real. The error is that we believe all the false judgements that arise from the ego’s limited and distorted understanding.
We project this out, meaning that we only see in others what we see within ourselves.
It is judgement that makes the justice of the world. The justice of the world relies on interpretation and not on fact. We interpret wrongly and we lose all sense of what is really real.
However, nothing real can be threatened and nothing unreal exists. These words prove that we have nothing to worry about. Worries simply arise from the perception of a judging mind.
All we need to do is to practice the type of forgiveness that A Course in Miracles teaches. True forgiveness proves that fear never was and love always is.
And the ceaseless singing just continues unabated. It’s a song of love in which we all just play a part.
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347/ Song of Heaven
7th July 2024
Do not choose amiss, or you will think that it is you who are creator in His place, and He is then no longer Cause but only an effect. Now healing is impossible, for He is blamed for your deception and your guilt. (ACIM, S-3.IV.5:3-4)
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Ref: No one forgives unless he has believed in sin, and still believes that he has much to be forgiven. Forgiveness thus becomes the means by which he learns he has done nothing to forgive. (ACIM, T-26.IV.1:5-6)
The guilt we share is all to do with being apart from God and it is this that has to be undone. Forgiveness is the process that allows this to happen.
The belief in sin is simply a mistake. Sin never happened and our minds cannot attack. Correct the error and we then discover what the error is hiding.
The miracle turns fear to love. Fear and love are the only two states a split mind can express. It is the same as saying that illusions are brought to truth and death disappears into life.
A Course in Miracles is therefore the reminder that truth needs no defence. There is only Heaven. If we remove the blocks to love’s presence, then we return to exactly where we have never left.
Heaven is a state of awareness that we have right now. It is always with us and never goes away.
Forgiveness brings us closer to our true Identity. It does this by bringing healing to our minds.
The Holy Spirit shows us life instead of death. We find what we are instead of what we are not.
The song of prayer reflects the Peace of God and all our voices are added to the song. It’s a song that shows us Heaven and the love that’s never gone.
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348/ Lies and Truth
8th July 2024
He Who is Love becomes the source of fear, for only fear can now be justified. Vengeance is His. His great destroyer, death. And sickness, suffering and grievous loss become the lot of everyone on earth, which He abandoned to the devil’s care, swearing He will deliver it no more. (ACIM, S-3.IV.5:5-8)
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Ref: Stop for a moment now and think of this: Is conflict what you want, or is God’s peace the better choice? Which gives you more? A tranquil mind is not a little gift. Would you not rather live than choose to die? (ACIM, M-20.4:6-9)
We can only have two states of mind. One is always in the foreground and the other sits quietly at the back, patiently waiting.
In the foreground is the ego, with all its sniping and its loaded thoughts; in the background is the Holy Spirit. Both the ego and the Holy Spirit are very happy to be the source of what we think.
The passage at the top of the page sums up how we view God if the ego has control of our minds; the second passage makes us question what would happen if we choose to think with the Holy Spirit.
The ego needs to be a god in its own right. All our fear and blame is heaped onto the perceived cause of all our problems, which is God. God is angry and the ego has to protect us from His ire.
The Holy Spirit is the Voice for God and therefore the Voice for Peace. Peace can only be attained through a quiet mind. The Holy Spirit is proof that God is real and God’s Love is all there is.
A Course in Miracles is therefore a practice that undoes the lie and replaces it with the truth.
The lie is that we are lonely, lost and abandoned without a hope. God has damned us to hell.
The truth is that God loves us eternally. Only by going within can we find the bliss that is our due.
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349/ Voice for God
9th July 2024
Come unto Me, My children, once again, without such twisted thoughts upon your hearts. You still are holy with the Holiness Which fathered you in perfect sinlessness, and still surrounds you with the Arms of peace. Dream now of healing. Then arise and lay all dreaming down forever. (ACIM, S-3.IV.6:1-4)
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Ref: No one on earth can grasp what Heaven is, or what its one Creator really means. Yet we have witnesses. It is to them that wisdom should appeal. (ACIM, M-23.6:1-3)
The first passage above comes from the final section of the Song of Prayer. It’s as if God is talking to us directly. A Course in Miracles therefore seems to end with a direct message from God.
Jesus is the messenger of A Course in Miracles, and Jesus is the ‘witness’ to which the second passage refers.
We do not know Heaven and we are afraid of God, and so we need a teacher who knows the truth.
There are many ‘witnesses’ who know God and who have provided us with a spiritual path. If the Christian faith is one interpretation of Jesus’ teaching, then A Course in Miracles has to be another.
A Course in Miracles shows us that God is Infinite Love, beyond words, and the Source of all there Is.
God created His one Son and this is what we are. The guilt we hold over spurning both God and Heaven is easily undone through the process of forgiveness.
The ego arose out of the separation and the ego crucifies us. The ego is really our terror of God.
The Holy Spirit is the silence and stillness within the mind, reflecting the light of Heaven. If the Holy Spirit is the Voice for God, then Jesus becomes the ‘witness’ whose love will bring us home.
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350/ Give and Receive
10th July 2024
You are he your Father loves, who never left his home, nor wandered in a savage world with feet that bleed, and with a heavy heart made hard against the love that is the truth in you. (ACIM, S-3.IV.6:5)
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Ref: God is my Father, and His Son loves Him. (ACIM, W-225)
The lesson above informs us that both giving and receiving are the same. God loves His Son and the Son returns the love to His Father. God and the Son are one in truth.
Truth depends on vision and light. The light that arises through vision is not the light that the body’s eyes perceive. Spiritual sight depends on a mind in which no darkness is perceived at all.
The mind is unified and has no opposite. There is nothing to oppose the Love of God. God is love and love is God, which means that His Son just extends what He receives.
Everything we see as a body is just a dream. At the top of the page, it mentions the feet that bleed and this is a metaphor for our extreme suffering. We are in exile from our Father and we hate it.
A Course in Miracles tells us that suffering only occurs in the mind. The mind either gives out love or fear, which means the mind is split between illusions and the truth.
The ego - the part of the mind that fears - tells us that death is our only certainty. The ego even hints that it will pursue us after death, meaning our minds are so unsettled that we never appreciate life.
The Holy Spirit - the part of the mind that belongs to God - knows there is only life. The Son of God is simply sleeping. The Holy Spirit’s whole purpose is to wake us up and show us our unending reality.
Within the dream, then, what we give and receive can change dramatically. As we awaken to truth, we find there is only love. When love is freely given, we find that joy just magnifies in the mind.
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