Opposites

Opposites must be brought together, not kept apart.

For their separation is only in your mind, and they are reconciled by union, as you are.

In union, everything that is not real must disappear, for truth is union.
As darkness disappears in light, so ignorance fades away when knowledge dawns.

Perception is the medium by which ignorance is brought to knowledge.

Yet the perception must be without deceit, for otherwise it becomes the messenger of ignorance rather than a helper in the search for truth.

The search for truth is but the honest searching out of everything that interferes with truth. Truth is. It can neither be lost nor sought nor found. It is there, wherever you are, being within you.

The New Beginning

The new beginning now becomes the focus of the curriculum. The goal is clear, but now you need specific methods for attaining it.

The speed by which it can be reached depends on this one thing alone; your willingness to practice every step.

Each one will help a little, every time it is attempted.
And together will these steps lead you from dreams of judgment to forgiving dreams and out of pain and fear.

They are not new to you, but they are more ideas than rules of thought to you as yet. So now we need to practice them awhile, until they are the rules by which you live.
We seek to make them habits now, so you will have them ready for whatever need.

Look straight at every image that rises to delay you, for the goal is inevitable because it is eternal. The goal of love is but your right, and it belongs to you despite your dreams.

The nature of God's Son

For we ascend unto the Father together, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, for such is the nature of God's Son as his Father created him.



Do not underestimate the power of the devotion of God's Son, nor the power the god he worships has over him. For he places himself at the altar of his god, whether it be the god he made or the God Who created him.
 
That is why his slavery is as complete as his freedom, for he will obey only the god he accepts.
The god of crucifixion demands that he crucify, and his worshippers obey. In his name they crucify themselves, believing that the power of the Son of God is born of sacrifice and pain.
 
The God of resurrection demands nothing, for He does not will to take away. He does not require obedience, for obedience implies submission. He would only have you learn your will and follow it, not in the spirit of sacrifice and submission, but in the gladness of freedom.

Celebration

Greetings and Blessings ......On this day the memory of the Birth of Christ ..seemingly 2010 years ago!

As I was watching the BBC broadcast of the Christmas-mass in St Peters with the Pope in all its speldor, I could not help but wonder how great the distance between the stable of the Birth of Jesus and this show.

In all that time the wealth accumulated by the message of Jesus is rather amazing and also to me a little sad.

A Star

The sign of Christmas is a star, a light in darkness. See it not outside yourself, but shining in the Heaven within, and accept it as the sign the time of Christ has come. He comes demanding nothing.

No sacrifice of any kind, of anyone, is asked by Him. In His Presence the whole idea of sacrifice loses all meaning. For He is Host to God.

And you need but invite Him in Who is there already, by recognizing that His Host is One, and no thought alien to His Oneness can abide with Him there.

Love must be total to give Him welcome, for the Presence of holiness creates the holiness that surrounds it. No fear can touch the Host Who cradles God in the time of Christ, for the Host is as holy as the Perfect Innocence which He protects, and Whose power protects Him.

This Christmas give the Holy Spirit everything that would hurt you. Let yourself be healed completely that you may join with Him in healing, and let us celebrate our release together by releasing everyone with us.
 
Leave nothing behind, for release is total, and when you have accepted it with me you will give it with me.
 
All pain and sacrifice and littleness will disappear in our relationship, which is as innocent as our relationship with our Father, and as powerful. Pain will be brought to us and disappear in our presence, and without pain there can be no sacrifice.
 
And without sacrifice there love must be.

return

The ego can accept the idea that return is necessary because it can so easily make the idea seem difficult. Yet the Holy Spirit tells you that even return is unnecessary, because what never happened cannot be difficult.

However, you can make the idea of return both necessary and difficult. Yet it is surely clear that the perfect need nothing, and you cannot experience perfection as a difficult accomplishment, because that is what you are.

This is the way in which you must perceive God's creations, bringing all of your perceptions into the one line the Holy Spirit sees. This line is the direct line of communication with God, and lets your mind converge with His.

There is no conflict anywhere in this perception, because it means that all perception is guided by the Holy Spirit, Whose Mind is fixed on God. Only the Holy Spirit can resolve conflict, because only the Holy Spirit is conflict-free.

He perceives only what is true in your mind, and extends outward only to what is true in other minds.

Light of the World

You are indeed the light of the world with such a function. The Son of God looks to you for his redemption. It is yours to give him, for it belongs to you.
Accept no trivial purpose or meaningless desire in its place, or you will forget your function and leave the Son of God in hell.

This is no idle request that is being asked of you. You are being asked to accept salvation that it may be yours to give.

Recognizing the importance of this function, we will be happy to remember it very often today.
We will begin the day by acknowledging it, and close the day with the thought of it in our awareness.

And throughout the day we will repeat this as often as we can:
The light of the world brings peace to every mind through my forgiveness. I am the means God has appointed for the salvation of the world.

Completed

And when correction is completed, time is eternity

The Holy Spirit can teach you how to look on time differently and see beyond it, but not while you believe in sin.

In error, yes, for this can be corrected by the mind. But sin is the belief that your perception is unchangeable, and that the mind must accept as true what it is told through it.
If it does not obey, the mind is judged insane.

The only power that could change perception is thus kept impotent, held to the body by the fear of changed perception which its Teacher, Who is one with it, would bring.

When you are tempted to believe that sin is real, remember this: If sin is real, both God and you are not.

Conflict

Conflict is the root of all evil, for being blind it does not see whom it attacks. Yet it always attacks the Son of God, and the Son of God is you.

God's Son is indeed in need of comfort, for he knows not what he does, believing his will is not his own.

The Kingdom is his, and yet he wanders homeless. At home in God he is lonely, and amid all his brothers he is friendless. Would God let this be real, when He did not will to be alone Himself?

And if your will is His it cannot be true of you, because it is not true of Him.
O my child, if you knew what God wills for you, your joy would be complete!

And what He wills has happened, for it was always true. When the light comes and you have said, "God's Will is mine," you will see such beauty that you will know it is not of you.

True identity

You are as God created you. All else but this one thing is folly to believe.
In this one thought is everyone set free. In this one truth are all illusions gone.

In this one fact is sinlessness proclaimed to be forever part of everything, the central core of its existence and its guarantee of immortality.

But let today's idea find a place among your thoughts and you have risen far above the world, and all the worldly thoughts that hold it prisoner.

And from this place of safety and escape you will return and set it free. For he who can accept his true Identity is truly saved.
And his salvation is the gift he gives to everyone, in gratitude to Him Who pointed out the way to happiness that changed his whole perspective of the world.
One holy thought like this and you are free: You are the holy Son of God Himself. And with this holy thought you learn as well that you have freed the world. You have no need to use it cruelly, and then perceive this savage need in it.

You set it free of your imprisonment. You will not see a devastating image of yourself walking the world in terror, with the world twisting in agony because your fears have laid the mark of death upon its heart.
Be glad today how very easily is hell undone. You need but tell yourself:
I am the holy Son of God Himself. I cannot suffer, cannot be in pain; I cannot suffer loss, nor fail to do all that salvation asks.
And in that thought is everything you look on wholly changed.

Every mistake must be a call for love.

Return with me to Heaven, walking together with your brother out of this world and through another, to the loveliness and joy the other holds within it.

Would you still further weaken and break apart what is already broken and hopeless?

Is it here that you would look for happiness? Or would you not prefer to heal what has been broken, and join in making whole what has been ravaged by separation and disease?

You have been called, together with your brother, to the most holy function this world contains.
It is the only one that has no limits, and reaches out to every broken fragment of the Sonship with healing and uniting comfort.
 
This is offered you, in your holy relationship. Accept it here, and you will give as you have accepted. The peace of God is given you with the glowing purpose in which you join with your brother. The holy light that brought you and him together must extend, as you accepted it.

recognition

If you will recognize that all the attack you perceive is in your own mind and nowhere else, you will at last have placed its source, and where it begins it must end.

For in this same place also lies salvation. The altar of God where Christ abideth is there. You have defiled the altar, but not the world. Yet Christ has placed the Atonement on the altar for you.

Bring your perceptions of the world to this altar, for it is the altar to truth. There you will see your vision changed, and there you will learn to see truly.

From this place, where God and His Son dwell in peace and where you are welcome, you will look out in peace and behold the world truly.

Yet to find the place, you must relinquish your investment in the world as you project it, allowing the Holy Spirit to extend the real world to you from the altar of God.

Interpretation

You have been told not to make error real, and the way to do this is very simple. If you want to believe in error, you would have to make it real because it is not true.

But truth is real in its own right, and to believe in truth you do not have to do anything. Understand that you do not respond to anything directly, but to your interpretation of it.

Your interpretation thus becomes the justification for the response. That is why analyzing the motives of others is hazardous to you.

If you decide that someone is really trying to attack you or desert you or enslave you, you will respond as if he had actually done so, having made his error real to you. To interpret error is to give it power, and having done this you will overlook truth.
Only appreciation is an appropriate response to your brother. Gratitude is due him for both his loving thoughts and his appeals for help, for both are capable of bringing love into your awareness if you perceive them truly.

And all your sense of strain comes from your attempts not to do just this. How simple, then, is God's plan for salvation.

A Constellation

Whenever you choose to make decisions for yourself you are thinking destructively, and the decision will be wrong.

It will hurt you because of the concept of decision that led to it. It is not true that you can make decisions by yourself or for yourself alone. No thought of God's Son can be separate or isolated in its effects.

Every decision is made for the whole Sonship, directed in and out, and influencing a constellation larger than anything you ever dreamed of.

Those who accept the Atonement are invulnerable. But those who believe they are guilty will respond to guilt, because they think it is salvation, and will not refuse to see it and side with it.
They believe that increasing guilt is self-protection. And they will fail to understand the simple fact that what they do not want must hurt them.

Love

It is in your power to make this season holy, for it is in your power to make the time of Christ be now.

It is possible to do this all at once because there is but one shift in perception that is necessary, for you made but one mistake. It seems like many, but it is all the same.

For though the ego takes many forms, it is always the same idea. What is not love is always fear, and nothing else.

It is not necessary to follow fear through all the circuitous routes by which it burrows underground and hides in darkness, to emerge in forms quite different from what it is.

Teaching and learning are your greatest strengths now, because they enable you to change your mind and help others to change theirs.

Refusing to change your mind will not prove that the separation has not occurred. The dreamer who doubts the reality of his dream while he is still dreaming is not really healing his split mind.

You dream of a separated ego and believe in a world that rests upon it. This is very real to you.
You cannot undo it by not changing your mind about it. If you are willing to renounce the role of guardian of your thought system and open it to me, I will correct it very gently and lead you back to God.

Every good teacher hopes to give his students so much of his own learning that they will one day no longer need him. This is the one true goal of the teacher.

Teaching

To teach a session of A Course in Miracles in a space with other brothers is naturally a greater challenge then writing a blog behind the keyboard of a laptop.

To look in the faces of my own reflection is a responsibility to remember it is just me, and not be affected by the idea of a teaching session that needs aceptance or approval outside of me.

New ideas are ever present to be received accepted-extended as an exposure as myself. 
A blog is an anonymous experience of declaring ideas without a reflection present that can show me my own images of fear.

Teaching in a session is an opening to disclose ideas that come from the unknown to the known.
The presence of other brothers in a teaching space, is a deeper self-recognition to being aware of the fear of losing self-importance.

Commitment

The Atonement is a total commitment. You may still think this is associated with loss, a mistake all the separated Sons of God make in one way or another. It is hard to believe a defense that cannot attack is the best defense.

This is what is meant by "the meek shall inherit the earth." They will literally take it over because of their strength. A two-way defense is inherently weak precisely because it has two edges, and can be turned against you very unexpectedly.

This possibility cannot be controlled except by miracles. The miracle turns the defense of Atonement to your real protection, and as you become more and more secure you assume your natural talent of protecting others, knowing yourself as both a brother and a Son.

I have stated that the basic concepts referred to in this course are not matters of degree. Certain fundamental concepts cannot be understood in terms of opposites. It is impossible to conceive of light and darkness or everything and nothing as joint possibilities.

They are all true or all false. It is essential that you realize your thinking will be erratic until a firm commitment to one or the other is made. A firm commitment to darkness or nothingness, however, is impossible. No one has ever lived who has not experienced some light and some thing. No one, therefore, is able to deny truth totally, even if he thinks he can.
Innocence is not a partial attribute. It is not real until it is total. The partly innocent are apt to be quite foolish at times. It is not until their innocence becomes a viewpoint with universal application that it becomes wisdom. Innocent or true perception means that you never misperceive and always see truly.

Giving is receiving

Ideas must first belong to you, before you give them. If you are to save the world, you first accept salvation for yourself.
But you will not believe that this is done until you see the miracles it brings to everyone you look upon.
Herein is the idea of giving clarified and given meaning.
Now you can perceive that by your giving is your store increased.

Protect all things you value by the act of giving them away, and you are sure that you will never lose them.
What you thought you did not have is thereby proven yours. Yet value not its form. For this will change and grow unrecognizable in time, however much you try to keep it safe.

No form endures. It is the thought behind the form of things that lives unchangeable.
Give gladly. You can only gain thereby. The thought remains, and grows in strength as it is reinforced by giving.

Temptation

Beware of the temptation to perceive yourself unfairly treated. In this view, you seek to find an innocence that is not Theirs but yours alone, and at the cost of someone else's guilt.

Can innocence be purchased by the giving of your guilt to someone else? And is it innocence that your attack on him attempts to get? Is it not retribution for your own attack upon the Son of God you seek?

Is it not safer to believe that you are innocent of this, and victimized despite your innocence? Whatever way the game of guilt is played, there must be loss. Someone must lose his innocence that someone else can take it from him, making it his own.

Whenever you consent to suffer pain, to be deprived, unfairly treated or in need of anything, you but accuse your brother of attack upon God's Son. You hold a picture of your crucifixion before his eyes, that he may see his sins are writ in Heaven in your blood and death, and go before him, closing off the gate and damning him to hell.

Yet this is writ in hell and not in Heaven, where you are beyond attack and prove his innocence. The picture of yourself you offer him you show yourself, and give it all your faith. The Holy Spirit offers you, to give to him, a picture of yourself in which there is no pain and no reproach at all. And what was martyred to his guilt becomes the perfect witness to his innocence.

Temple of God

(From Joel Goldsmith)

“Know ye not that ye are the Temple of God, know ye not that your body is the Temple of God?”

Feed this into your mind morning noon and night, and see what happens to you in your relationship with other people in this world, and their relationship with you.
Now what is the use of playing around with those outworn theological misconceptions—when you have a direct divinely inspired piece of Scripture to tell you that “you are the Temple of God.” And this must be so if “the Kingdom of God is within you” then you are the Temple—in which that God functions—a temple not made with hands!
Ah, here is the mystery, people look at themselves in the mirror, and they see what seems to be a corporeal body—and, they immediately identify this with themselves. Whereas, this body is not you, this body is yours!

You are incorporeal and spiritual; you are not in this body; you never have been inside this body; you never have looked out from within this body.

( A Course in Miracles)
In this world, not even the body is perceived as whole. Its purpose is seen as fragmented into many functions with little or no relationship to each other, so that it appears to be ruled by chaos.
Guided by the ego, it is. Guided by the Holy Spirit, it is not. It becomes a means by which the part of the mind you tried to separate from spirit can reach beyond its distortions and return to spirit.

The ego's temple thus becomes the temple of the Holy Spirit, where devotion to Him replaces devotion to the ego. In this sense the body does become a temple to God; His Voice abides in it by directing the use to which it is put.

From Carlos Castenedas

Self-importance is our greatest enemy. Think about it--what weakens us is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of our fellow men.

Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone.

Every effort should be made to eradicate self-importance from the lives of warriors. Without self-importance we are invulnerable.

Self-importance can't be fought with niceties.

Friends

And now you stand in terror before what you swore never to look upon.

Your eyes look down, remembering your promise to your "friends." The "loveliness" of sin, the delicate appeal of guilt, the "holy" waxen image of death, and the fear of vengeance of the ego you swore in blood not to desert, all rise and bid you not to raise your eyes.
For you realize that if you look on this and let the veil be lifted, they will be gone forever. All of your "friends," your "protectors" and your "home" will vanish. Nothing that you remember now will you remember.

Brothers

He Who willed not to be without His Son could never will that you be brotherless. And would He give a brother unto you except he be as perfect as yourself, and just as like to Him in holiness as you must be?

There must be doubt before there can be conflict. And every doubt must be about yourself. Christ has no doubt, and from His certainty His quiet comes.
Whatever form of specialness you cherish, you have made sin. Inviolate it stands, strongly defended with all your puny might against the Will of God.

And thus it stands against yourself; your enemy, not God's. So does it seem to split you off from God, and make you separate from Him as its defender. You would protect what God created not. And yet, this idol that seems to give you power has taken it away.
For you have given your brother's birthright to it, leaving him alone and unforgiven, and yourself in sin beside him, both in misery, before the idol that can save you not.

It is not you who are so vulnerable and open to attack that just a word, a little whisper that you do not like, a circumstance that suits you not, or an event that you did not anticipate upsets your world, and hurls it into chaos.
 
Truth is not frail. Illusions leave it perfectly unmoved and undisturbed. But specialness is not the truth in you. It can be thrown off balance by anything.
 
What rests on nothing never can be stable. However large and overblown it seems to be, it still must rock and turn and whirl about with every breeze.

Idols

Seek not outside yourself. For it will fail, and you will weep each time an idol falls. Heaven cannot be found where it is not, and there can be no peace excepting there.

Each idol that you worship when God calls will never answer in His place. There is no other answer you can substitute, and find the happiness His answer brings.

Seek not outside yourself. For all your pain comes simply from a futile search for what you want, insisting where it must be found. What if it is not there?

Do you prefer that you be right or happy? Be you glad that you are told where happiness abides, and seek no longer elsewhere. You will fail. But it is given you to know the truth, and not to seek for it outside yourself.

Self-Reliance ( Emmerson)

"Man is his own star; and the soul that can

Render an honest and a perfect man,

Commands all light, all influence, all fate;

Nothing to him falls early or too late.

Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,

Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."

The Body

The body, if properly understood, shares the invulnerability of the Atonement to two-edged application.

This is not because the body is a miracle, but because it is not inherently open to misinterpretation. The body is merely part of your experience in the physical world. Its abilities can be and frequently are overevaluated.

However, it is almost impossible to deny its existence in this world. Those who do so are engaging in a particularly unworthy form of denial. The term "unworthy" here implies only that it is not necessary to protect the mind by denying the unmindful.

If one denies this unfortunate aspect of the mind's power, one is also denying the power itself.

All material means that you accept as remedies for bodily ills are restatements of magic principles. This is the first step in believing that the body makes its own illness. It is a second misstep to attempt to heal it through non-creative agents.
 
It does not follow, however, that the use of such agents for corrective purposes is evil. Sometimes the illness has a sufficiently strong hold over the mind to render a person temporarily inaccessible to the Atonement.
 
In this case it may be wise to utilize a compromise approach to mind and body, in which something from the outside is temporarily given healing belief. This is because the last thing that can help the non-right-minded, or the sick, is an increase in fear.
 
They are already in a fear-weakened state. If they are prematurely exposed to a miracle, they may be precipitated into panic. This is likely to occur when upside-down perception has induced the belief that miracles are frightening.