God's Plan

How simple, then, is God's plan for salvation. There is but one response to reality, for reality evokes no conflict at all.

There is but one Teacher of reality, Who understands what it is. He does not change His Mind about reality because reality does not change.

Although your interpretations of reality are meaningless in your divided state, His remain consistently true.

He gives them to you because they are for you. Do not attempt to "help" a brother in your way, for you cannot help yourself.

But hear his call for the Help of God, and you will recognize your own need for the Father.

God's plan

This step, the smallest ever taken, is still the greatest accomplishment of all in God's plan of Atonement.

All else is learned, but this is given, complete and wholly perfect.

No one but Him Who planned salvation could complete it thus.

The real world, in its loveliness, you learn to reach.

Fantasies are all undone, and no one and nothing remain still bound by them, and by your own forgiveness you are free to see.

Yet what you see is only what you made, with the blessing of your forgiveness on it.

And with this final blessing of God's Son upon himself, the real perception, born of the new perspective he has learned, has served its purpose.

Purity

In the temple, holiness waits quietly for the return of them that love it.

The Presence knows they will return to purity and to grace.

The graciousness of God will take them gently in, and cover all their sense of pain and loss with the immortal assurance of their Father's Love.

There, fear of death will be replaced with joy of life.

For God is Life, and they abide in Life. Life is as holy as the Holiness by Which it was created.

The Presence of holiness lives in everything that lives, for holiness created life, and leaves not what it created holy as itself.

Guidance

God does not guide, because He can share only perfect knowledge.

Guidance is evaluative, because it implies there is a right way and also a wrong way, one to be chosen and the other to be avoided.

By choosing one you give up the other. The choice for the Holy Spirit is the choice for God.

God is not in you in a literal sense; you are part of Him.

When you chose to leave Him He gave you a Voice to speak for Him because He could no longer share His knowledge with you without hindrance.

Direct communication was broken because you had made another voice.

The only choice

Therefore it is the only choice there is.

Believe in the resurrection because it has been accomplished, and it has been accomplished in you.

This is as true now as it will ever be, for the resurrection is the Will of God, which knows no time and no exceptions.

But make no exceptions yourself, or you will not perceive what has been accomplished for you.

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. 

No-one knows me!

In the mind in time and space there is an idea ..No-one knows me! Poor me! ...
I am not appreciated. I am misunderstood ....

No you are not those insane ideas, as God knows you perfectly and that is what all knowledge is.

The question can only be " Do you want to know yourself as God knows you?

 Knowing yourself is the constant reminder of who you are in the love of God as given  in A Course in Miracles

This is a course in how to know yourself.

You have taught what you are, but have not let what you are teach you.

You have been very careful to avoid the obvious, and not to see the real cause and effect relationship that is perfectly apparent.

Yet within you is everything you taught. What can it be that has not learned it?

I will be still and listen to the truth.

What does it mean to give and to receive?
Ask and expect an answer. Your request is one whose answer has been waiting long to be received by you.

It will begin the ministry for which you came, and which will free the world from thinking giving is a way to lose.

And so the world becomes ready to understand and to receive.

Be still and listen to the truth today. For each five minutes spent in listening, a thousand minds are opened to the truth and they will hear the holy Word you hear.

And when the hour is past, you will again release a thousand more who pause to ask that truth be given them, along with you.


Today the holy Word of God is kept through your receiving it to give away, so you can teach the world what giving means by listening and learning it of Him.
 
Do not forget today to reinforce your choice to hear and to receive the Word by this reminder, given to yourself as often as is possible today:

Awakening

There is a shock that comes to those who learn their savior is their enemy no more.

There is a wariness that is aroused by learning that the body is not real.
And there are overtones of seeming fear around the happy message, "God is Love."

Yet all that happens when the gap is gone is peace eternal. Nothing more than that, and nothing less.
 
Without the fear of God, what could induce you to abandon Him? What toys or trinkets in the gap could serve to hold you back an instant from His Love?
 
Would you allow the body to say "no" to Heaven's calling, were you not afraid to find a loss of self in finding God?
 
Yet can your self be lost by being found?

Christ

Because he is your equal in God's Love, you will be saved from all appearances and answer to the Christ Who calls to you.

Be still and listen. Think not ancient thoughts. Forget the dismal lessons that you learned about this Son of God who calls to you.

Christ calls to all with equal tenderness, seeing no leaders and no followers, and hearing but one answer to them all. Because He hears one Voice,

He cannot hear a different answer from the one He gave when God appointed Him His only Son.

Be very still an instant. Come without all thought of what you ever learned before, and put aside all images you made.

Christ

Christ is at God's altar, waiting to welcome His Son.

But come wholly without condemnation, for otherwise you will believe that the door is barred and you cannot enter.

The door is not barred, and it is impossible that you cannot enter the place where God would have you be.

But love yourself with the Love of Christ, for so does your Father love you. You can refuse to enter, but you cannot bar the door that Christ holds open.

Come unto me who hold it open for you, for while I live it cannot be shut, and I live forever. God is my life and yours, and nothing is denied by God to His Son.

An instant

Let this instant become a time in which we share a new experience for you, yet one as old as time and older still. Hallowed your name.

Your glory undefiled forever. And your wholeness now complete, as God established it.

You are His Son, completing His extension in your own.

We practice but an ancient truth we knew before illusion seemed to claim the world.

And we remind the world that it is free of all illusions every time we say:



God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

From the Fourth Way Ouspensky)

THE idea of the existence of a hidden knowledge, surpassing all the knowledge a man can attain by his own efforts, must grow and strengthen in people’s minds from the realisation of the insolubility of many questions and problems which confront them


Man may deceive himself, may think that his knowledge grows and increases, that he knows and understands more than he knew and understood before, but sometimes he may be sincere with himself and see that in relation to the fundamental problems of existence he is as helpless as a savage or a little child, although he has invented many clever machines and instruments which have complicated his life but have not rendered it any more comprehensible


Speaking still more sincerely with himself man may recognise that all his scientific and philosophical systems and theories are similar to these machines and implements, for they only serve to complicate the problems without explaining anything.

Christ

Let the Christ in you interpret for you, and do not try to limit what you see by narrow little beliefs that are unworthy of God's Son.

For until Christ comes into His Own, the Son of God will see himself as Fatherless.

I am your resurrection and your life. You live in me because you live in God.

And everyone lives in you, as you live in everyone.

Can you, then, perceive unworthiness in a brother and not perceive it in yourself?

And can you perceive it in yourself and not perceive it in God?

Believe in the resurrection because it has been accomplished, and it has been accomplished in you.

Spirit I Am

You see the flesh or recognize the spirit. There is no compromise between the two.

If one is real the other must be false, for what is real denies its opposite.

There is no choice in vision but this one. What you decide in this determines all you see and think is real and hold as true.

On this one choice does all your world depend, for here have you established what you are, as flesh or spirit in your own belief.

If you choose flesh, you never will escape the body as your own reality, for you have chosen that you want it so.

But choose the spirit, and all Heaven bends to touch your eyes and bless your holy sight, that you may see the world of flesh no more except to heal and comfort and to bless.



Salvation is undoing. If you choose to see the body, you behold a world of separation, unrelated things, and happenings that make no sense at all.

Lilies

The lilies that your brother offers you are laid upon your altar, with the ones you offer him beside them.

Who could fear to look upon such lovely holiness?

The great illusion of the fear of God diminishes to nothingness before the purity that you will look on here.

Be not afraid to look.

The blessedness you will behold will take away all thought of form, and leave instead the perfect gift forever there, forever to increase, forever yours, forever given away.

My Child

You, my child, are afraid of your brothers and of your Father and of yourself.
But you are merely deceived in them.

Ask what they are of the Teacher of reality, and hearing His answer, you too will laugh at your fears and replace them with peace.

For fear lies not in reality, but in the minds of children who do not understand reality.

It is only their lack of understanding that frightens them, and when they learn to perceive truly they are not afraid.

And because of this they will ask for truth again when they are frightened. It is not the reality of your brothers or your Father or yourself that frightens you.

You do not know what they are, and so you perceive them as ghosts and monsters and dragons.

Ask what their reality is from the One Who knows it, and He will tell you what they are.

For you do not understand them, and because you are deceived by what you see you need reality to dispel your fears.

Enemies

It is surely apparent by now why the ego regards spirit as its "enemy."

The ego arose from the separation, and its continued existence depends on your continuing belief in the separation.

The ego must offer you some sort of reward for maintaining this belief.
All it can offer is a sense of temporary existence, which begins with its own beginning and ends with its own ending.

It tells you this life is your existence because it is its own.

Against this sense of temporary existence spirit offers you the knowledge of permanence and unshakable being.

No one who has experienced the revelation of this can ever fully believe in the ego again.

Believes

Since you believe that you are separate, Heaven presents itself to you as separate, too.

Not that it is in truth, but that the link that has been given you to join the truth may reach to you through what you understand.

Father and Son and Holy Spirit are as One, as all your brothers join as one in truth.

Christ and His Father never have been separate, and Christ abides within your understanding, in the part of you that shares His Father's Will.

The Holy Spirit links the other part - the tiny, mad desire to be separate, different and special - to the Christ, to make the oneness clear to what is really one.

In this world this is not understood, but can be taught.

Escape

In learning to escape from illusions, your debt to your brother is something you must never forget.

It is the same debt that you owe to me.

Whenever you act egotistically towards another, you are throwing away the graciousness of your indebtedness and the holy perception it would produce.

The term "holy" can be used here because, as you learn how much you are indebted to the whole Sonship, which includes me, you come as close to knowledge as perception can.

The gap is then so small that knowledge can easily flow across it and obliterate it forever.

You have very little trust in me as yet, but it will increase as you turn more and more often to me instead of to your ego's guidance

The results will convince you increasingly that this choice is the only sane one you can make.
 
No one who learns from experience that one choice brings peace and joy while another brings chaos and disaster needs additional convincing.

Love is Universal

Love is the most universal, the most tremendous

and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces.

You see yourself locked in a separate prison, removed and unreachable, incapable of reaching out as being reached.

You hate this prison you have made, and would destroy it.

But you would not escape from it, leaving it unharmed, without your guilt upon it.

Yet only thus can you escape. The home of vengeance is not yours; the place you set aside to house your hate is not a prison, but an illusion of yourself.
 
The body is a limit imposed on the universal communication that is an eternal property of mind. But the communication is internal.
 
Mind reaches to itself. It is not made up of different parts, which reach each other. It does not go out.
 
Within itself it has no limits, and there is nothing outside it. It encompasses everything. It encompasses you entirely; you within it and it within you. There is nothing else, anywhere or ever.

A Journey

You have reached the end of an ancient journey, not realizing yet that it is over.

You are still worn and tired, and the desert's dust still seems to cloud your eyes and keep you sightless.

Yet He Whom you welcomed has come to you, and would welcome you. He has waited long to give you this.

Receive it now of Him, for He would have you know Him.

Only a little wall of dust still stands between you and your brother.

Blow on it lightly and with happy laughter, and it will fall away. And walk into the garden love has prepared for both of you.

Compromise

The inevitable compromise is the belief that the body must be healed, and not the mind.

For this divided goal has given both an equal reality, which could be possible only if the mind is limited to the body and divided into little parts of seeming wholeness, but without connection.

This will not harm the body, but it will keep the delusional thought system in the mind. Here, then, is healing needed. And it is here that healing is.

For God gave healing not apart from sickness, nor established remedy where sickness cannot be.

They are together, and when they are seen together, all attempts to keep both truth and illusion in the mind, where both must be, are recognized as dedication to illusion; and given up when brought to truth, and seen as totally unreconcilable with truth, in any respect or in any way.

Dreaming

Yet where are dreams but in a mind asleep?

And can a dream succeed in making real the picture it projects outside itself?

Save time, my brother; learn what time is for. And speed the end of idols in a world made sad and sick by seeing idols there.

Your holy mind is altar unto God, and where He is no idols can abide.
The fear of God is but the fear of loss of idols. It is not the fear of loss of your reality.

But you have made of your reality an idol, which you must protect against the light of truth.
And all the world becomes the means by which this idol can be saved.

Salvation thus appears to threaten life and offer death.

Resurrection As The Transformation of Life

Resurrection is much more than lifting ourselves out of a tomb in order to walk the earth again.

The Master Jesus has already made that demonstration for us.

Even though to human sense we may appear to pass on, our resurrection is assured—in far less than three days.

We shall never be entombed; we shall never be buried or cremated—that will never happen to us.

The tomb is our own concept of body.

( Joel Goldsmith)

My Brother

My brother, you are part of God and part of me.

When you have at last looked at the ego's foundation without shrinking you will also have looked upon ours.

I come to you from our Father to offer you everything again.

Do not refuse it in order to keep a dark cornerstone hidden, for its protection will not save you.

I give you the lamp and I will go with you. You will not take this journey alone.

I will lead you to your true Father, Who hath need of you, as I have.

Will you not answer the call of love with joy?

Two forces

Conflict must be between two forces.

It cannot exist between one power and nothingness.

There is nothing you could attack that is not part of you.

And by attacking it you make two illusions of yourself, in conflict with each other.

And this occurs whenever you look on anything that God created with anything but love.

Conflict is fearful, for it is the birth of fear. Yet what is born of nothing cannot win reality through battle.

Why would you fill your world with conflicts with yourself?

Let all this madness be undone for you, and turn in peace to the rememberance of God, still shining in your quiet mind.

History by Ralph W Emmerson

I am owner of the sphere, Of the seven stars and the solar year,


Of Caesar’s hand, and Plato’s brain, Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakspeare’s strain.  here is one mind common to all individual men.

Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same.

He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate.

What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand.

Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done,

for this is the only and sovereign agent.

 UNDERSTAND THAT WHAT YOU USUALLY CALL “I” IS NOT I; there are many “I’s” and each “I” has a different wish.

Try to verify this. You wish to change, but which part of you has this wish? Many parts of you want many things, but only one part is real.

It will be very useful for you to try to be sincere with yourself.

Sincerity is the key which will open the door through which you will see your separate parts, and you will see something quite new.

You must go on trying to be sincere. Each day you put on a mask, and you must take it off little by little.



(G.I Gurdjieff)

THERE DO EXIST ENQUIRING MINDS,

..... which long for the truth of the heart, seek it, strive to solve the problems set by life, try to penetrate to the essence of things and phenomena and to penetrate into themselves.

If a man reasons and thinks soundly, no matter which path he follows in solving these problems, he must inevitably arrive back at himself, and begin with the solution of the problem of what he is himself and what his place is in the world around him.

For without this knowledge, he will have no focal point in his search. Socrates’ words, “Know thyself” remain for all those who seek true knowledge and being.


Faith of consciousness is freedom



Faith of feeling is weakness


Faith of body is stupidity.


Love of consciousness evokes the same in response


Love of feeling evokes the opposite


Love of body depends only on type and polarity.


Hope of consciousness is strength


Hope of feelings is slavery


Hope of body is disease.

(G.I Gurdjieff)

The Will of God

An "unwilling will" does not mean anything, being a contradiction in terms that actually means nothing.

When you think you are unwilling to will with God, you are not thinking. God's Will is thought.

It cannot be contradicted by thought. God does not contradict Himself, and His Sons, who are like Him, cannot contradict themselves or Him.

Yet their thought is so powerful that they can even imprison the mind of God's Son, if they so choose.

This choice does make the Son's function unknown to him, but never to his Creator. And because it is not unknown to his Creator, it is forever knowable to him.

Compensations

The very nature of our inner, personal world is a system of images from our memory arranged according to our individual psychosomatic structures into compensations.

These compensations keep us from feeling that we're not the center of the universe, by structuring a universe in our mind that is centered on us.


What do these compensations compensate for?

Our illusory belief that we're separated from Reality.

This feeling is captured poignantly in the opening lines of a poem by Richard Rose,

"A Worm Beneath a Highway":

I was an earthworm yesterday


And all my life I lived in clay


And did aspire the light....


To understand our compensations, the starting point is to look at our values

Views from another world

Besides self-knowledge, there is another aspect of the search—self-development.

Let us see how things stand there.

It is clear that a man left to his own devices cannot wring out of his little finger the knowledge of how to develop and, still less, exactly what to develop in himself.

And it is here that a man’s flair is more important than anywhere else.

He chooses a guide for himself. It is of course an indispensable condition that he choose as a guide a man who knows, or else all meaning of choice is lost.

Who can tell where a guide who does not know may lead a man?

As a man gets to know himself, he continually finds new areas of his mechanicalness—let us call it automatism—domains where his will, his “I wish,” has no power, areas not subject to him, so confused and subtle that it impossible to find his way about in them without the help and the authoritative guidance of someone who knows.



This briefly is the state of things in the realm of self-knowledge: in order to do you must know; but to know you must find out how to know. We cannot find this out by ourselves.

Correction

In order to heal, it thus becomes essential for the teacher of God to let all his own mistakes be corrected.

If he senses even the faintest hint of irritation in himself as he responds to anyone, let him instantly realize that he has made an interpretation that is not true.

Then let him turn within to his Eternal Guide, and let Him judge what the response should be.
So is he healed, and in his healing is his pupil healed with him.

The sole responsibility of God's teacher is to accept the Atonement for himself. Atonement means correction, or the undoing of errors.

When this has been accomplished, the teacher of God becomes a miracle worker by definition.

His sins have been forgiven him, and he no longer condemns himself.

How can he then condemn anyone? And who is there whom his forgiveness can fail to heal?

Views from the Real World by G.I Gurdieff

I have already said that there are people who hunger and thirst for truth.

If they examine the problems of life and are sincere with themselves, they soon become convinced that it is not possible to live as they have lived and to be what they have been until now; that a way out of this situation is essential and that a man can develop his hidden capacities and powers only by cleaning his machine of the dirt that has clogged it in the course of his life.

But in order to undertake this cleaning in a rational way, he has to see what needs to be cleaned, where and how; but to see this for himself is almost impossible.

In order to see anything of this one has to look from the outside; and for this mutual help is necessary.

Gradually, by meeting people who are searching, by talking to them and by reading relevant books, a man becomes drawn into the sphere of questions concerning self-development.


To a man who is searching with all his being, with all his inner self, comes the unfailing conviction that to find out how to know in order to do is possible only by finding a guide with experience and knowledge, who will take on his spiritual guidance and become his teacher.



Every seeker dreams of a guide who knows, dreams about him but seldom asks himself objectively and sincerely—is he worthy of being guided? Is he ready to follow the way?

Your special function ...

...is the special form in which the fact that God is not insane appears most sensible and meaningful to you.

The content is the same.

The form is suited to your special needs, and to the special time and place in which you think you find yourself, and where you can be free of place and time, and all that you believe must limit you.

The Son of God cannot be bound by time nor place nor anything God did not will.

Yet if His Will is seen as madness, then the form of sanity which makes it most acceptable to those who are insane requires special choice.

Nor can this choice be made by the insane, whose problem is their choices are not free, and made with reason in the light of sense.