"Perhaps there is a fear of failure and shame associated with a sense of inadequacy."
"As long as you perceive the body as your reality, so long will you perceive yourself as lonely and deprived. And so long will you also perceive yourself as a victim of sacrifice, justified in sacrificing others."
If there is some way that you are found, or find yourself to be, not equal, it will induce a sense of inadequacy. This is based on a perceive lack of value or worth. And this in turn will induce a feeling of shame and unworthiness.
Whatever is considered the ideal, or the optimum or best way to be, if you do not "measure up", or you are evaluated to be less than or lacking, this inadequacy will present shameful feelings. As if you are lacking something.
Ultimately if you look at the body, the body was made on purpose to limit you, confine you, define you as very restricted, with only a small handful of abilities. It can only move so fast, perform so good, look so attractive, etc. If you identify with a body, you fundamentally identify with being inadequate. Which produces automatic shame.
So anyone who has identified with a body is automatically grandfathered in to feeling a sense of shame and unworthiness. Because no body, no matter how great it seems to be, is free of limitations. And every body was made from the idea of imperfection and is inehrently inadequate.
It doesn't therefore matter how beautiful you make it look, how much muscle you build, how tall and hansom it is, how fair and lovely, it can never fully represent your perfection. It can never be "good enough". So if you think of it as your self, and you take personally anything about it, you are doomed to find yourself not good enough.No-one who believes they are a body can be satisfied with their "self image". Even those who believe their body is god-like and fantastic, must at some level suspect their flawed and limited nature. Any amount of body identification is going to condemn you as less than whole and less than perfect.
Sometimes also the things that bodies do, or the we use them for, fall far short of perfection. And that means that almost everything we do with them is prone to result in a judgement of inadequacy. It doesn't even matter if you try to be proud of it or pleased with it or amazed by its greatness, these are all forms of denial of the inherent limitation and lack that the body represents.
There is also a fear of failure that automatically must be present for anyone who considers themselves a body. Since it is recognized how limited you are, that you do not know how to do something, or be guaranteed to do it perfectly, it presents an inherent recognition that it WILL fail to some degree. And this induces fear. So the inadequate and the shameful are afraid of failure, knowing that they ARE a failure, having identified with failure.
The only way to transcend inadequacy and be fully released from shame, is to embrace your REAL perfection, which is your spirit. To be spirit identified is to overcome all limitation and thus all inability, insufficiency and incapability. There can be no grounds for shame in owning up to being immortal and divine.
"This perception places you in a position in which your problem solving must be inadequate, and failure must be inevitable. ""Being unable to love, the ego would be totally inadequate in Love's presence, for it could not respond at all. You would HAVE to abandon its guidance, for it would be quite apparent that it had not taught you the response pattern you NEED."
"But the means are tedious and very time consuming, for all of them LOOK TO THE FUTURE for release from a state of present unworthiness and inadequacy."
"God is the strength in which I trust. Now try to slip past all concerns related to your own sense of inadequacy."
Here is a very important statement by Jesus:
"Never attempt to OVERLOOK your guilt BEFORE you ask the Holy Spirit's help."
Notice how this says ****NEVER****. That means, without exception. The Holy Spirit is supposed to be involved in ALL healing and ALL forgiveness.
Now, if you also look at what we're told about the Holy Spirit, he is the HELP that God appointed to us. He is the only therapist. He is the healer. We are NOT asked to do everything on our own, and in fact that would be arrogant, because we haven't got a clue what to do. We NEED HIS HELP because we are tangled and caught up in so many illusions, misbeliefs, misinterpretations and are somewhat clueless about how to get out of it.
The Holy Spirit does have a FUNCTION, a place, a role. The holy instant itself is supposed to remove fear and hatred from your mind. The Holy Spirit himself is supposed to heal you. Which means you need only provide a little willingness, and invite him in, and welcome him, and make room for Him to operate through you. You are supposed to let Him express through you, talk through you, heal through you. You have to allow Him to operate on you, allowing Him to do His job. The course is not a self-study, it's a cooperative partnership.
"I do NOT feel guilty, because the Holy Spirit will undo ALL the consequences of my wrong decision IF I WILL LET HIM."
By all consequences he means every symptom, side effect, condition, sickness, upset, and any form of suffering, which you induced through your poor choosing. "I made the decision myself." He can and will heal all of it on all levels, if you will trust and allow him to do so. But this act of trust, is more than just surrender. Surrender is like going up to the front door and opening it, to see Him outside waiting to enter. You have to go even further, to step aside and let Him walk in through the door. He wants to live in you. And by healing you, He makes you an instrument of healing.
"I will be healed as I let him teach me to heal."
This entails receiving Help. Receiving love. Not just conceptually, but through will and openness and trust and connection. Love does not enter where it's not welcome. You have to not only invite it in, you have to welcome it. And welcome means willingness to move past and let go of anything that He wants to access. You have to let him into your house, take up residence in you and operate your appliances. You have to make room in you for this to happen. You have to share yourself with Him. And by doing so, you share His function.
He has Gifts of God to give to you, if you will allow and receive them. But you have to honestly want them, thus welcome them, and therefore be open to receiving what has been given. Just as God has a symbiotic relationship with His souls, so too the Holy Spirit is part you, part God. Let Him into you, into your body, into your feelings, let Him operate on you, let Him work through you, and let Him heal you FOR you.
---
"You cannot see the Holy Spirit, but you can see His manifestations. And unless you do, you will not realize He is there. Miracles are His witnesses, and speak for his Presence. What you cannot see becomes real to you only through the witnesses who speak for it. For you can be AWARE of what you cannot see, and it can become compellingly real to you, as its presence becomes manifest THROUGH you. Do His work, for you SHARE in His function. As your function in Heaven is creation, so your function on earth is healing. God shares His function with you in Heaven, and the Holy Spirit shares His with you on earth."
---
"Prepare you NOW for the undoing of what never was. If you already UNDERSTOOD the difference between truth and illusion, Atonement would HAVE no meaning. The holy instant, your holy relationship, the Holy Spirit's teaching, and all the means by which salvation is accomplished, would have no purpose. For they are all but ASPECTS of the plan to change your dreams of fear to happy dreams, from which you waken easily to knowledge. Put yourself NOT in charge of this, for you can NOT distinguish between advance and retreat. Some of your greatest advances YOU have judged as failures, and some of your deepest retreats YOU have evaluated as success.
Never approach the holy instant AFTER you have tried to remove all fear and hatred from your mind. That is ITS function. Never attempt to OVERLOOK your guilt BEFORE you ask the Holy Spirit's help. That is HIS function. Your part is only to offer Him a LITTLE willingness to LET Him remove all fear and hatred, and to BE forgiven. On your little faith, joined with HIS understanding, HE will build your part in the Atonement, and MAKE SURE that you fulfill it easily. And, WITH Him, YOU will build a ladder planted in the solid rock of faith, and rising even to Heaven. Nor will you use it to ascend to Heaven alone."
Ok I thought I'd have fun with an overly long title ;-)
There is something that some ACIM students do, which I find quite annoying. I shouldn't. But I do.
Ok so ACIM has "levels" in it. There are contexts. There is the bigger context of God/Heaven/Creation, there is the context of the separation and everything inside the ego's world (the "real world" or forgiven world at best). And there is the context of mis-perceiving the world you made (making the world seem like hell).
What happens is, you can be talking about one of the lower levels, discussing some topic, and someone comes along and "trumps" everything you say, by jumping out of context to the higher level. This makes it almost impossible to hold a conversation about anything.
For example, you could be talking about performing miracles and healing people and raising the dead etc, and someone will come along and say "there's no point doing that, bodies don't exist". Or, "there is no world, why bother healing anyone". Or, "its an illusion so whats the point" sort of thing. What's happening there is LEVEL CONFUSION, where they're believing the larger context of truth at a higher level, while still being AT a lower level, and then using the higher-level information to modify whether to do or not do something on the lower level. Classic level confusion.
But what really drives it home, is the ego benefit that doing this has. It means you can jump "higher" than someone else's statements by switching levels. You get to "one up" them by superceding the entire context of the conversation, overriding everything that is said, not because it seems true but because the ego uses it as a weapon or device for "winning" against others.
Trying to find this "higher ground" of "bigger truth" so that arguments can be won. Even if it's totally off-topic. The benefit to the ego is that this makes the person intellectually arrogant, condescending, righteous, sacrificial, cold-hearted and ignorant of the miracle-working that we're supposed to be doing while in the world. And if anything even hints at implying that "there are bodies" or anything remotely like that, they're all over it like a swarm of ants.
It has led many people to this kind of cold-shoulder attitude about the world, in which these higher-level statements are used as "defenses" and denial, to deflect away any suggestion that there's any point doing ANYTHING to help anyone else. By shifting levels either mid-conversation or mid-sentence, the person is able to overthrow the conversation and grin happily at having seemingly blown up all reasoning.
I've found over time that such people generally seem to have "difficulty" comprehending or discerning or recognizing "context", especially if they are not aware that the course contains levels. It is also near-impossible to explain to such persons why they are doing this. I've met some people who will focus so heavily on the "higher level truth" in such total denial of ANYTHING to do with a lower level - the world, dealing with bodies, healing others etc, that they will not let you even say a single thing about the lower-level without it being "corrected" and evaluated as wrong.
They come across as cold, arrogant, uncaring and lacking empathy. I've had to block some of these people because I find them to be emotionally abusive, often aggressive, stubborn, righteous and unwilling to listen. It's as if to say "nothing happened, so any discussion of anything happening is an error". It's used as a defensive weapon of false logic to justify doing nothing in the world, helping no-one else, and basically disappearing off on a cloud and leaving everyone else behind. Honestly, it is SELFISH, egotistical, and separating.
Some of these same people also tend to become quite "non-duality" focused, which is a view in which there is only one son and there is no-one else to help, nothing else to do, nothing to heal, etc. It's unfortunate, and it's not just that they are so advanced that they understand the levels and where and when they are switching levels and why, or that they even show a willingness to stay within context.
They literally are blind to it and will just position themselves intellectually on the "side" of the higher truth in an effort to reject, separate from, attack and conquer anything remotely "down to earth". I also find that these same people seem to have trouble with reasoning and logic, and so the metaphysical foundation of things is obscure to them. They will brush aside any rational statements by switching levels and trumping the discussion through denial. The level of denial is generally high and somehow they've used denial to "deny the world" and the body, rather than really being willing to properly heal it. They seem stuck in their heads.
Anyway... just one of my pet peeves at the moment. Something to forgive of course.
Properly speaking, every mind which is split needs rehabilitation. The medical orientation emphasizes the body, and the vocational orientation stresses the ego. The team approach generally leads more to confusion than anything else, because it is too often misused as an expedient for sharing the ego's dominion with other ego's rather than as a real experiment in cooperation of minds.
The reason why Bill needs this experience is because he needs rehabilitating himself. How often have I answered "help him" when you asked me to help you? He, too, has asked for help, and he has been helped whenever he was truly helpful to you. He has also gained to whatever extent he could give. He will help YOU more truly by going, if he can remember all the time he is there that his ONLY reason for being there is to REPRESENT ME.
Rehabilitation, as a movement, has been an improvement over overt neglect, but it is often little more than a painful attempt on the part of the halt to lead the blind. Bill, you will see this at every meeting. But this is not why you were chosen to go. You have a fear of broken bodies, because your ego cannot tolerate them. Your ego cannot tolerate ego-weakness, either, without ambivalence, because it is afraid of its own weakness and the weakness of its chosen home.
That is really why you recoil from the demands of the dependent, and from the sight of a broken body. Your ego is threatened, and blocks your natural impulse to help, placing you under the strain of divided will. You withdraw to allow your ego to recover, and to regain enough strength to be helpful again on a basis limited enough NOT to threaten your ego, but also too limited to give YOU joy.
Those with broken bodies are often looked down on by the ego, because of its belief that nothing but a perfect body is worthy as its OWN temple. A mind that recoils from a hurt body is in great need of rehabilitation itself. A damaged brain is also hardly a danger. ALL symptoms of hurt need true helpfulness, and whenever they are met with this, the mind that so meets them heals ITSELF.
Rehabilitation is an attitude of praising God as He Himself knows praise. He offers praise to you, and you must offer it to others. The real limitations on clinical psychology, as it is evaluated by its followers at present, are not reflected by the attitudes of psychiatrists, or medical boards, or hospital administrators, even though most of them are sadly in need of rehabilitation themselves.
The real handicaps of the clinicians lie in their attitudes to those whom their egos perceive as weakened and damaged. By these evaluations, they have weakened and damaged their own helpfulness, and have thus set their own rehabilitation back. Rehabilitation is NOT concerned with the ego's fight for control, nor the ego's need to avoid and withdraw.
Bill, you can do much on behalf of your own rehabilitation AND Helen's, and much more universally as well, if you think of the Princeton meetings in this way:
I am here ONLY to be truly helpful.
I am here to represent Christ, who sent me.
I do not have to worry about what to say or what to do,
because the one who sent me will direct me.
I am content to be wherever He wishes, knowing he goes
there with me.
I will be healed as I let him teach me to heal.
The idea that the world is just a dream, may sound very simple. But to fully and completely embrace it is a very tall order. If the world is just a dream, it changes your ENTIRE relationship to everything, to all people and object and events and places. Every single happening is framed differently, every interaction has a different meaning, and every piece of physical matter is up for question.
To accept this idea intellectually is very easy. It makes a lot of sense. If you can see the logic behind it, that we made this world as an opposite to God, and is therefore not real, you can accept that as making sense.
But to live it, to deep dive into it, to apply it everywhere and at all times, to remember it in the midsts of all happenings, to use it in all relationships, and to completely uproot all previous beliefs is long term challenge.
For me, the seemingly logical and clear conclusion that the world is not real, has become so refined and polished that I can see nothing to contradict it. Like, it makes total sense on paper. However, I still have a vast repository of "other beliefs" which have been convinced otherwise over time.
Beliefs in bodies being real. Beliefs in being a body. Beliefs in other people being bodies. Beliefs in events happening. Beliefs in seriousness and importance. Beliefs in value and priorities and hierarchies of difficulty. Beliefs in justified reactions and ego emotions and normality and human nature. All of those things scream that the world is real.
So what I find is that although I understand it in theory, my mind and beliefs still are quite uncertain about this idea. I go towards it a little more only to find other beliefs springing up into awareness saying, "but what about....". And every SINGLE one of those beliefs is rooted in the belief that the world is reality. The basic opposite premise of the dream. Each one of them signals and testifies that this is not just a dream.
So the mind then finds itself pulled in two directions. One direction pulls toward the seemingly glowing new "idea" or light, that it's true the world is just a dream and nothing is happening and no-one has ever sinned. And the other direction pulls towards the old worn out darkness of nightmares and hell, that there is sin everywhere and no hope for salvation.
"Some of your greatest advances YOU have judged as failures, and some of your deepest retreats YOU have evaluated as success."
"If you want to be different, I will wait until you change your mind. I can teach you, but only you can choose to listen to my teaching."
I will go towards the light of the truth, and the ego mind will go into doubt, which is fear. It will say, but what about this, and what about that.... there will be an uncertainty and a "not sure about this" and a "can this really be true?". There is a DIS-BELIEF.
"Ultimately, space is as meaningless as time. Both are merely beliefs. The real purpose of this world is to use it to correct your unbelief."
And the fact is that EVERY single opposition to the truth has to be uprooted and corrected and dispelled in order to have NO OBJECTIONS to accepting the atonement. If there is even a slight reason why you might not trust the truth, or suspect that it is false, or have a slight confusion about whether it is true or false, then you will not whole-heartedly accept the salvation it offers. Atonement can only be fully accepted through TOTAL willingness and certainty.
So I keep "naturally" checking and re-checking, looking at what the course says, reminding myself of its facts, re-considering the possibility that I might be mistaken about this new idea. I can't help but be "open minded" about the possibility that it is WRONG, because my ego already believes it is wrong and this pulls me into entertaining its possibility. And until I am wholly certain of its truth, which has to run VERY deeply and fully, this will keep happening.
"Until this distinction is made, however, the vacillations between free and imprisoned will cannot but continue."
These vacillations are to be expected for anyone who is attempting to awaken from the dream. If the world IS a dream and we have been believing it is NOT a dream, but a reality, then our entire way of believing and thinking and perceiving is going to have to go through a 180-degree transformation. Or as Jesus puts it, the upside-down thought system has to be turned right-side up, and that means nothing short of a complete reversal of your thought system and "world view".
Reversing your thought system WILL entail nothing less than realizing that everything you thought was what you did NOT want, you want. Everything you thought was evil, is good. Everything you thought was good, is evil. And all ego beliefs which claim a lie are actually claiming something else. It requires a tremendous sorting out of what is TRUE and what is FALSE, and in this endeavor you WILL be mistaken throughout the process. Which is why it requires a little willingness to consider the possibility that something else might be true, beyond what you currently believe.
I approach and I retreat. I get closer to accepting and then the ego fear pops up. I use the confusion as an opportunity to find more clarity, and then advance forward again. Each time becoming a little and more convinced, not just in theory but in practice, in direct experience, of the world's unreality. Because if what ACIM says is true, then "awareness of dreaming" and "the body is a dream" must become my new reality, before I can go home to God.
One thing is for sure, the road home to God is winding with spluttering false starts and lurches and gradual progress."I can but choose to wander off a while, and then return. Your loving Voice will always call me back, and guide my feet aright.""He will return and go still farther, or perhaps step back a while and then return again."
"Let us return the dream he gave away unto the dreamer, who perceives the dream"
"The Second Coming is merely the return of sense."
What, then, remains to be undone, for you to REALIZE Their Presence? Only this; you have a DIFFERENTIAL view of WHEN attack is justified, and WHEN you think it is unfair, and NOT to be allowed. When you perceive it AS unfair, you think that a response of anger now is just. And thus you see what IS the same as DIFFERENT. Confusion is not limited. If it occurs at all, it WILL be total. And its presence, in WHATEVER form, will hide Their Presence. They are known with clarity, or not at all. Confused perception will block knowledge. It is NOT a question of the SIZE of the confusion, or HOW MUCH it interferes. Its simple PRESENCE shuts the door to Theirs, and keeps Them there unknown.
What does it MEAN if you perceive attack in certain FORMS to be unfair to you? It means that there MUST be some forms in which YOU THINK IT FAIR. For otherwise, how could some be evaluated as UNfair? Some, then, are GIVEN meaning, and perceived as sensible. And only SOME are seen as meaningLESS. And this DENIES the fact that ALL are senseless; EQUALLY without a cause or consequence, and CANNOT have effects of ANY kind. Their Presence is obscured by ANY veil which stands between Their shining innocence and your awareness it is your own, and EQUALLY belongs to every living thing along with you. God limits not. And what is limited can NOT be Heaven. So it MUST be hell.
Unfairness and attack are ONE mistake, so firmly joined that where one is perceived, the other MUST be seen. You cannot BE unfairly treated. The belief you ARE is but another form of the idea you are deprived by someone NOT yourself. PROJECTION of the cause of sacrifice is at the root of everything perceived to be unfair, and NOT your just deserts. Yet it is YOU who ask this of yourself, in deep injustice to the Son of God. You HAVE no enemy except yourself, and you are enemy indeed to him, because you do not know him AS yourself. What COULD be more unjust than that he be deprived of what he IS, denied the right to be himself, and asked to sacrifice his Father's Love and yours, as NOT his due?
Beware of the temptation to perceive yourself unfairly treated. In this view, you seek to find an innocence which 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 this innocence, which 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.
You think your brother is unfair to you BECAUSE you think that one must be unfair to MAKE the other innocent. And in this game do you perceive one PURPOSE of your whole relationship. And this you seek to ADD unto the purpose GIVEN it. The Holy Spirit's purpose is to let the Presence of your holy Guests be known to you. And TO this purpose nothing CAN be added, for the world is purposeless except for this. To add or take away from this ONE goal is but to take away ALL purpose from the world, and from yourself. And each unfairness that the world appears to lay upon you, you have laid on it, by rendering it purposeless, without the function that the Holy Spirit sees. And simple justice has been thus denied to every living thing upon the earth.
What this injustice does to you who judge unfairly, and who see as you have judged, you cannot calculate. The world grows dim and threatening, and not a trace of all the happy sparkle that salvation brought can you perceive, to lighten up your way. And so you see YOURSELF deprived of light, abandoned to the dark, unfairly left without a purpose in a futile world. The world is fair because the Holy Spirit has brought injustice to the Light within, and there has ALL unfairness been resolved, and been REPLACED with justice and with love. If you perceive injustice anywhere, you need but say, "By this do I DENY the Presence of the Father and the Son. And I would rather know of Them than see injustice, which Their Presence shines away."
Sometimes, although we don't want anyone to suffer, and God does not will anyone suffer, ... .sometimes someone going through a "thing", a hardship, a suffering, is actually consentual and beneficial to the person.
There can be a great compulsion to stop it, solve it, take it away, make it better, avoid it, etc.... we are VERY avoidant of any threat to us. But in the big picture, these "trials" as they say are actually "lessons", which we've sort of agreed to go through in order to grow spiritually.
If we are in the business of just taking away everyone's troubles all the time, we might actually be denying them a tremendous opportunity for advancement.
How do we know that, perhaps a person becoming an alcoholic and hitting rock bottom could actually lead to them becoming a powerful advocate for healthy living and helping others to escape from it?
Or that, someone going through a horrible nightmarish experience of sickness might actually lead to new perspectives and opportunities and maybe even a new future career that ends up helping a lot of people? We have to be careful not to think always in such short-term aims, and look instead to what the purpose is in the LONG TERM plan of atonement.
Very often the things you go through give you a lot of wisdom and insight and personal experience, which "equips you" in a sense with perspectives and abilities and compassion for others who might go through something similar. And then you might find yourself using that to be helpful to them down the line.
You might for example have elected to be a really great therapist or something and, in order to do so, wanted to first-hand go through some horrible abuse situation which you had to experience and work through and heal, in order to find a way out, in order to become able to help others to find a way out. And without that, you might not have been able to be useful in that way, for the higher purposes of the atonement plan.
On an earthly level we often interpret any bad thing as bad and wrong and to make it stop. We insulate ourselves from problems and sufferings. We label all unpleasant things as unwanted. We try to make an idyllic life, comfortable and controlled, to shut out the chaos.
But in the big picture of the soul we come here to learn lessons, to grow, to advance towards God. The importance of returning to God in the long term, across even lifetimes, may be so significant that we would be willing to even go through hell and back if it meant we would find a way to rise above it when pushed to our limits.
A person might actually on a higher level be willing to go through tremendously difficult lessons because, in the big picture, they know what it is leading to. The potential for major spiritual growth. An opportunity to see the other side of a situation. The purpose of finding a different way to relate to others etc.
It's not like, God is there saying, you must suffer and I want you to go have a horrible disfigurement just so that you can learn, or some kind of cruel karmic punishment scenario. But because we have chosen to go away from God and into ego, we "need" lessons to help us to return to him. And that means we have beliefs that need undoing, and attitudes that need correction.
So we then find that the atonement plan is set up to use our "faults" and our unwillingness and our biases and blind spots and so on, as "lessons", which may appear at first like horrible trials and difficult challenges, in order to try to find a "better way". To find a way to make a better choice in that scenario so that in future we don't need to go through something like that. Or rather, that we stop making those kinds of forms of suffering because we've learned that they are ultimately not in our best interests.
So in general we can't be quick to judge whether something is a good thing or not. The most horrible looking through could well be very much consensual and very much asked for. If the soul knows that there is the POTENTIAL for massive growth and learning, it may in fact be WILLING on a deep level to suffer the most horrendous difficult challenges, because it knows that the payoff may be really really worth it.
So hats off to all you people who are and have gone through horrible states of hell and nightmares and abuses and victimhood and all manner of pain and misery. Because it may well indicate not that it was just some thing that "was not meant to happen" but rather, something that you consented to and were WILLING to experience because it would potentially have tremendous spiritual benefits.
No sane person in their right mind would want to choose any such trial or difficulty, but it's because we're NOT in our right minds that we DO choose these things, and the holy spirit REPURPOSES these things, in an effort to use them productively and constructively, to help us to make the best of it, so that it isn't all for nothing and a waste of time.
This is a more FORGIVING view of suffering, because it reframes it as potentially beneficial when used for a higher purpose. Instead of focusing on the thing itself through false perception, labelling it a dark and wrong and unwanted. We can USE anything for the purpose of becoming closer to God, and that's what all these "trials" are all about.
"What could you not accept, if you but knew that everything which happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good? Perhaps you have misunderstood His plan, for He would never offer pain to you. But your defenses did not let you see His loving blessing shine in every step you ever took. While you made plans for death, He led you gently to Eternal Life." UrW139L19
"Trials are but lessons which you failed to learn presented once again, so where you made a faulty choice before you now can make a better one, and thus escape all pain which what you chose before has brought to you." UrT31H2
"The misuse of will engenders a situation which, in the extreme, becomes altogether intolerable. Pain thresholds can be high, but they are not limitless. Eventually, everybody begins to recognize, however dimly, that there MUST be a better way. As this recognition is more firmly established, it becomes a perceptual turning-point." UrT2B69
"In every difficulty, all distress, and each perplexity you face Christ calls to you, and gently says, "My brother, choose again." He would not leave one source of pain unhealed, nor any image left to veil the truth. He would remove all misery from you whom God created altars unto joy. He would not leave you comfortless, alone in dreams of hell, but would release your minds from everything that hides His Face from you. His holiness is yours because He is the ONLY power that is real in you. His strength is yours because He is the Self that God created as His ONLY Son. The images you make can not prevail against what God Himself would have you be." UrT31H3
"Some of your greatest advances YOU have judged as failures, and some of your deepest retreats YOU have evaluated as success." UrT18F1
"There IS no choice where every end is sure. Perhaps you would prefer to try them all, before you REALLY learn they are but one. The roads this world can offer seem to be quite large in number, but the time must come when everyone begins to see how like they are to one another. Men have died on seeing this, because they saw no way EXCEPT the pathways offered by the world. And, learning THEY led nowhere, lost their hope. And yet this was the time they COULD have learned their greatest lesson. All must reach this point, and go BEYOND it. It is true indeed there is no choice at all within the world. But this is NOT the lesson in itself. The lesson has a PURPOSE, and in THIS you come to understand what it is FOR." UrT31D3
To heal is to liberate totally. We once said there is no order in miracles because they are all MAXIMAL EXPRESSIONS OF LOVE. This has no range at all. The non-maximal only APPEARS to have a range. This is because it SEEMS to be meaningful to measure it FROM the maximum and identify its position by HOW MUCH IT IS NOT THERE. Actually, this does not mean ANYTHING. It is like negative numbers in that the concept can be used theoretically, but it has NO application practically. It is true that if you put three apples on the table and then took them AWAY, the three apples are NOT THERE. But it is NOT true that the table is now MINUS three apples. If there is NOTHING on the table, it does NOT matter what WAS there in terms of amount. The "nothing" is neither greater nor less because of what is ABSENT.
That is why "all" and "nothing" are dichotomous, WITHOUT A RANGE. This is perfectly clear in maximal test performance and for EXACTLY the reason you emphasize. You cannot interpret AT ALL, unless you assume either MAXIMAL motivation or its COMPLETE ABSENCE. Only in these two conditions can you validly COMPARE responses, and you MUST assume the former, because if the LATTER is true, the subject WILL NOT DO ANYTHING. Given VARIABLE motivation he WILL do something, but you CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS.
The RESULTS of tests are evaluated relatively, ASSUMING maximal motivation. But this is because we are dealing with ABILITIES, where degree of development IS meaningful. This does NOT mean that what ability is used FOR is necessarily either limited OR divided. But one thing is certain. Abilities are POTENTIALS for learning, and you will apply them to WHAT YOU WANT TO LEARN. Learning is EFFORT, and effort MEANS will.
You will notice that we have used the term "abilities" as a plural, which is correct. This is because abilities began with the ego, which perceived them as a POTENTIAL FOR EXCELLING. This is how the ego STILL perceives them and uses them. It does NOT want to teach everyone all it has learned, because that would DEFEAT its purpose in learning. Therefore, it does not REALLY learn at all. The Holy Spirit teaches YOU to use what the ego has made to TEACH the opposite of what the ego has LEARNED. The KIND of learning is as irrelevant as is the particular ability which was applied TO the learning.
You could not have a better example of the Holy Spirit's (this) unified purpose than this course. The Holy Spirit has taken very diversified areas of YOUR past learning, and has applied them to a UNIFIED curriculum. The fact that this was NOT the ego's reason for learning is totally irrelevant. YOU made the effort to learn, and the Holy Spirit has a unified goal for ALL effort. He ADAPTS the ego's potentials for excelling to potentials for EQUALIZING. This makes them USELESS for the ego's purpose, but VERY useful for His.
If different abilities are applied long enough to one GOAL, the abilities THEMSELVES become unified. This is because they are channelized in one direction, or in one WAY. Ultimately, then, they all contribute to ONE RESULT, and by so doing, their SIMILARITY rather than their differences is emphasized. You can EXCEL in many DIFFERENT ways, but you can EQUALIZE in ONE WAY ONLY. Equality is NOT a variable state, by definition.
That is why we once said that papers will be easy to write when you have learned THIS course. To the ego there appears to be no connection, because the EGO is discontinuous. But the Holy Spirit teaches one lesson and applies it to ALL individuals in ALL situations. Being conflict free, He maximizes ALL efforts and ALL results. By teaching the power of the Kingdom of God Himself, He teaches you that ALL POWER IS YOURS. Its application does not matter. It is ALWAYS maximal. Your vigilance does NOT establish it as yours, but it DOES enable you to use it ALWAYS and in ALL WAYS.
When I said, "Behold I am with you always," I meant it literally. I am not absent to ANYONE nor in ANY situation. BECAUSE I am always with you, YOU are the Way, and the Truth, and the Light. YOU did not make this power any more than I did. It was created to BE shared, and therefore cannot be meaningfully perceived as BELONGING to anyone AT THE EXPENSE of another. This perception makes it meaningLESS by eliminating or overlooking its real and ONLY meaning.
You can easily escape into concepts, theories, course quotes as defences, in order to avoid something you don't want to admit to.
Instead of being willing to accept something uncomfortable, you go into denial, and start fighting against the thing with dissociation and intellectual "rising above."
There are things about this world that can be quite unpleasant. Someone dying, the loss of a house, wars raging, people being mis-treated and all that.
We become upset about the thing, not really because of what it is, but because we refuse to accept it. We make something of it, and then we start reacting to what we made of it, and going off on a tangent of a whole new kind of suffering which is even worse than the thing we were avoiding.
Yes nasty things seem to occur. These are kind of like hard facts. In space and time, in physical terms, they happen. Spiritually-minded people love to bypass this and start "attacking it away" with spiritual quote fests, favourite phrases, comments about how its not real, how we're not at the effect of it, and all this. But what this then becomes is avoidance.
If we would stay with the thing and admit to it, stare it in the face, confront it head-on, and be willing to actually look at it, we would be remaining in the present. We would be being honest. We would be not going into denial or trying to cover it up or placate it or make it go away because we don't like it.
And, as it turns out, this present confrontation with the thing helps you to retain your sanity, helps you to not avoid or hide, and helps you to accept it. It's the acceptance of it that actually gives you freedom from it, rather than all these efforts to change it into something, to bypass it spiritually, to move into the intellect, or to sprit the fuck out of it to make it not be there.
For all the time I for example have been dealing with loss over the death of my wife, ACIM has offered a lot of high-level clarity about what it really is, what hasn't actually happened, and all this stuff about how its my belief in it that makes me suffer. A whole lot of metaphysical philosophising and trying to rise above it, to transcend it, to forgive it, to find some peace somehow. But in a way, this has all been a way of avoiding looking at it - a form of denial.
Acceptance is needed in order to be able to let something go and move on. You can't find acceptance by wanting something to change, to be different, to have not happened. You also can't find acceptance by not being willing to admit that the thing HAS happened. It's staring you in the face and practically screaming at you that "this has occurred." On a physical level, IT HAS.
If you avoid this fact, you are putting yourself out of touch with reality. Not that the world is real but the attitude towards this world also in turn becomes your attitude about God. If you avoid an illusion, you avoid God. If you can't look at the world, you can't look at your self. If you hide from changes, you can't embrace changelessness.
So it may be true actually that we find more peace and acceptance through allowing the world to be the way it is, accepting what HAS happened even if that seems to be "making sin real", and even if it seems somehow to be giving the ego a whole lot of credit. What's the alternative, hide from the ego and hurl abuse at it from the mountain top? Or should we own what we've done to ourselves?
ACIM on the one hand is saying things like, "its not real, it hasn't happened, it's not true, the world is a dream, it's all an illusion, nothing is wrong, there is no death" etc. But this is higher level truth. On the physical level there is much that is wrong, and there is death, and people are sick.
Jesus refers to avoiding the "facts" of the world as "a particularly unworthy form of denial." Such as trying to deny that bodies exist. Yes ultimately they don't, but that's not your experience right now. Death does appear to happen. If you deny that you will suffer MORE than if you had accepted it. The person that dies is dead, physically at least. And that has to be acknowledged. No amount of running away from it into the mind's fantasies will undo that fact.
While it is not pleasant, we do have to stop being in denial. We have to stop avoiding what's happened or happening. It's not spiritual, it's a bypass. A mis-use of ACIM's teachings has led me and many people to try living on a cloud in avoidance of the battleground, rather than to take a good hard look at the battleground. It takes some deep soul-searching to admit to this.
We can't get to the "forgiven world" without being willing to look at it through the eyes of Christ. And that does mean looking at it, not looking away from it. It means staring it down. Being aware of all the nasty shit that is happening. Looking at it with Christ so that we translate it into a more tolerable interpretation, NOT as a bypass or an avoidance or a defense or an attempt to put some distance between you and the facts.
"Let all things be exactly as they are."
"The fear of healing arises in the end from an unwillingness to accept the unequivocal fact that healing is necessary. The fear arises because of the necessary willingness to look at what man has done to himself."
"The Separation HAS occurred. To deny this is merely to misuse denial. However, to concentrate on error is merely a further misuse of legitimate psychic mechanisms. The true corrective procedure, which has already been described as the proper use of the spiritual eye (or true vision), is to accept the error temporarily, BUT ONLY as an indication that IMMEDIATE correction is mandatory. This establishes a state of mind in which the Atonement can be accepted without delay."
"Perhaps it will be helpful to remember that no-one can be angry at a fact. It is always an interpretation that gives rise to negative emotions, regardless of their seeming justification by what appear as facts."
"But it is true that the world must be looked at differently, if His promises are to be accepted. What the world is, is but a fact. You cannot choose what this should be. But you can choose how you would see it. Indeed, you must choose this."
"How can a fact be fearful, unless it DISAGREES with what you hold more dear than truth? Reason will tell you that this fact is your RELEASE."
"The body is merely a fact. Its ABILITIES can be, and frequently are, over-evaluated. However, it is almost impossible to deny its existence. Those who do are engaging in a particularly unworthy form of denial."
"What could you not accept, if you but knew that everything which happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good? Perhaps you have misunderstood His plan, for He would never offer pain to you. But your defenses did not let you see His loving blessing shine in every step you ever took. While you made plans for death, He led you gently to Eternal Life."