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A Course in Miracles is a self-study course. In the beginning it tells us, "This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean you can establish the curric...
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About CIMS | |
Course in Miracles Society (CIMS) is an international group of Course students and teachers organized to discover, authenticate and propagate the Divine Teachings of A Course in Miracles.
As students, we seek to increase our knowledge of Jesus' words and to deepen our experience of His teachings.
As teachers, we work to circulate the message of
A Course in Miracles throughout the world by our words, by our deeds, and by the example of our lives. COURSE IN MIRACLES SOCIETY Omaha, NE USA 800-771-5056 402-315-3607[email protected]
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Artwork by Suzette Boulais
"SALVATION AND THE HOLY RELATIONSHIP"
I. "Introduction"
3 A holy relationship starts from a different premise. Each one has looked within and seen no lack. Accepting his completion, he would extend it by joining with another, whole as himself. He sees no difference between these selves, for differences are only of the body. Therefore, he looks on nothing he would take. He denies not his own reality, because it is the truth. Just under Heaven does he stand, but close enough not to return to earth. For this relationship has Heaven's holiness. How far from home can a relationship so like to Heaven be?
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<AUDIO><VIDEO> Voice and Music by CIMS SonShip Radio
The world is false perception. It is born
of error, and it has not left its source.
It will remain no longer than the thought
that gave it birth is cherished. When the thought
of separation has been changed to one
of true forgiveness, will the world be seen
in quite another light; and one that leads
to truth, where all the world must disappear,
and all its errors vanish. Now its source
has gone, and its effects are gone as well.
The world was made as an attack on God.
It symbolizes fear. And what is fear
except love's absence? Thus the world was meant
to be a place where God could enter not,
and where His Son could be apart from Him.
Here was perception born, for knowledge could
not cause such insane thoughts. But eyes deceive,
and ears hear falsely. Now mistakes become
quite possible, for certainty has gone.
The mechanisms of illusion have
been born instead. And now they go to find
what has been given them to seek. Their aim
is to fulfill the purpose which the world
was made to witness and make real. They see
in its illusions but a solid base
where truth exists, upheld apart from lies.
Yet everything which they report is but
illusion which is kept apart from truth.
As sight was made to lead away from truth,
it can be redirected. Sounds become
the call of God. And all perception can
be given a new purpose, by the One
Whom God appointed Saviour to the world.
Follow His light, and see the world as He
beholds it. Hear His Voice alone in all
that speaks to you. And let Him give you peace
and certainty, which you have thrown away,
but Heaven has preserved for you in Him.
Let us not rest content until the world
has joined our changed perception. Let us not
be satisfied until forgiveness has
been made complete. And let us not attempt
to change our function. We must save the world.
For we who made it must behold it through
the eyes of Christ, that what was made to die
can be restored to everlasting life.
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DAILY LESSON
L e s s o n 244
I am in danger nowhere in the world.
<AUDIO><VIDEO>
Your Son is safe wherever he may be,
for You are there with him. He need but call
upon Your Name, and he will recollect
his safety and Your Love, for they are one.
How can he fear or doubt or fail to know
he cannot suffer, be endangered, or
experience unhappiness, when he
belongs to You, beloved and loving, in
the safety of Your Fatherly embrace?
And there we are in truth. No storms can come
into the hallowed haven of our home.
In God are we secure. For what can come
to threaten God Himself, or make afraid
what will forever be a part of Him?
~ Original Handscript of ACIM
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ACIM Edmonton - Sarah's Reflections
Lesson 244
I am in danger nowhere in the world.
The quotes in this article are from the Foundation for Inner Peace edition, with the reference cited. There is also the quote references for similar quotes in the ACIM Original Edition.
Sarah's Commentary:
As we watch the news reports coming from different parts of the world and see the devastation and havoc being created by wars and natural disasters, we can truly wonder about a lesson that says "I am in danger nowhere in the world." It does seem that we can suffer, can be endangered, and can experience feelings of vulnerability. It does look like storms can indeed come to threaten us, whether physically or psychologically, yet here we are assured that this is not the case. We are safe wherever we may be (1.1) but in our seeming reality as a body and personality, we are constantly in danger. In that state, we are truly vulnerable. Our invulnerability is in who we are as the Son of God.
Jesus reminds us that we are still with God. While in the dream, we can be hurt, but Jesus reminds us that we are not really here at all. Our reality is outside of time and space, and when we look from above this battleground we recognize that our concerns have no reality.
What gave rise to the body in the first place was our belief that we attacked God. Thus our biggest fear is of God, Whom we now believe will punish us for this attack. This is our final obstacle to peace. It is our fear that we will be punished for our belief that we have left our home in God. We see the world and our body as a place to hide from Him, and we use the experience of being victimized to proclaim our lack of responsibility for our condition. Instead, we blame our brothers and hope they will be punished instead of us, but this is only playing out in the mind. It is a story made up by the ego and is not the truth. Our reality is invulnerable and God is our loving Father with no axe to grind. The guilt that is in the mind is the result of buying into the myth that we could separate from love. Now that guilt is projected out, making a body and world where we hide from God and feel vulnerable and alone. The truth is that we are eternally safe.
When we believe we are in danger, we employ all kinds of ways to try to keep ourselves safe. We ultimately know that it is a losing battle, but we tend to avoid that fact and do everything in our power to keep ourselves physically and psychologically safe. Yet it takes a tremendous toll on us and eventually we succumb to the ravages of time. To be freed of this thought system of guilt and fear is to recognize that our reality is beyond this dream and nothing can endanger who we are. The peace of God is in our minds. When we connect to this truth about ourselves, we bring a new awareness into the dream. We seem to be the same as everyone else, yet we reflect peace and joy that is palpable to others. Thus we become a demonstration of the decision that we have made for healing.
If the script is already written and everything has already happened, then we can become more of the observer of the events from outside of the dream rather than as a dream figure in the dream. If we knew that this fragile body is not who we are, and if we can't change anything regarding the chosen time of our passing into another realm, then all of the ways that we try to keep ourselves safe would lose their power. Instead of seeing the body and the world as a place of danger, we now see it as a place of opportunity where we learn to forgive all thoughts of guilt and fear that keep us in a state of anxiety. Our only choice in the dream is the interpretation that we give to every situation and every event. When we turn to the ego as our teacher to show us the meaning of the event, we will experience guilt and fear. But with forgiveness, Jesus shows us that we can find true joy and peace.
Why would we choose suffering when we have been given help to release it? The only thing that is required of us is honesty and courage in taking responsibility for our thoughts and bringing them to the truth. The Holy Spirit does the rest. Is it a sacrifice to give up our suffering? As Byron Katie asks, "Who would you be without your anxiety?" Suffering offers us something that we want, or we would give it up gladly. What we still cling to and think we want is our individuality and our specialness, and that is why guilt still holds attraction for us.
To say that we choose suffering, unhappiness and distress sounds far-fetched, yet if we did not get some kind of payoff, we would simply release these feelings. While these thoughts fuel the ego and we still identify with our separate selves, we fear loss of this self, thus we resist releasing them. Have you noticed how the mind holds onto obsessive thoughts? We tell stories of how justified we are to feel the way we do. We try to get others to side with our stories, which, in our minds, simply give more credence to our version of events. Isn't it wonderful that we truly have a choice by bringing our awareness to the payoff we are getting and making a different decision? It is that simple, even though it is not easy. We need to stay vigilant in watching our thoughts and having the desire and willingness to release them to the Holy Spirit who will do the rest.
As we were reminded in the lesson yesterday, this process requires great honesty. If we are defending and justifying, we are not being honest. Honesty requires that we take total responsibility. " This is the only thing that you need do for vision, happiness, release from pain, and the complete escape from sin, all to be given you. Say only this, but mean it with no reservations, for here the power of salvation lies: I am responsible for what I see. I choose the feelings I experience, and I decide upon the goal I would achieve. And everything that seems to happen to me I ask for, and receive as I have asked." (T.21.II.2.1-5)
(ACIM OE T.21.III.14-15)
We all have experienced many miracle, and with each shift, we realize that this Course is not about blind faith. We increasingly see that, as we apply the lessons to the day to day events and situations and people in our lives, we experience a shift in how we see things. Sometimes it seems that the changes are little by little, and at other times a whole new level of awareness rushes in like a wave crashing onto the shore. Recognize that each time that you forgive, you are peeling away another layer of false perception.
I've often said that, in a difficult relationship, we don't need the other person to participate in the healing. It only takes one. As we are told in Chapter 5, "Your brother does not have to be aware of the Holy Spirit in himself or in you for this miracle to occur." (T.5.III.2.8)(ACIM OE T.5.V.33) I remember when my ex-husband stood at my door and asked me, apparently out of the blue, if he could hug me and proceeded to tell me what a wonderful job I had done with raising our son. This came years after our divorce when I had released many grievances I had held against him. The interesting thing about all of this is that the miracle does not come on our timetable or by our request, but when the total openness, willingness and readiness is there to receive it. We may think we have done the work, but until we really open the door to Him, it is the ego demanding that things be different. It is all quite perfect and in perfect timing. Miracles are not under our control. All we have to do is our small part. Yes, sometimes it seems to take years. Other times, months or weeks go by before we see this kind of evidence of healing, but time is quite irrelevant to it all. It is not about our timetable, and it is not what shows up in form, but the peace that is our gift the instant that healing is received. We will never know the impact of our healing on the world, and it does not matter. What matters is the choice we are making in each moment, which is the choice for the grievance or for the miracle, for the ego or the Holy Spirit.
We don't need to try to understand it. As Jesus says, " Miracles are merely the sign of your willingness to follow the Holy Spirit's plan of salvation, recognizing that you do not understand what it is." (T. 9.IV.6.3)(ACIM OE T.9.III.15) Yet while we still need healing, miracles are the only witnesses to our true reality that we can recognize. It is important that we do bring our attention and awareness to these events in our lives. " Miracles demonstrate that learning has occurred under the right guidance, for learning is invisible and what has been learned can be recognized only by its results." (T.12.VII.1.1)
(ACIM OE T.11.VIII.61)
Today we go in gratitude for the beauty that surrounds us, for His presence that goes with us, for the haven of protection that is always there for each of us, and the confidence that we hold for the healing that is available when we are ready to accept it, and we hold that same confidence in our brothers and sisters. They too have the same truth available within them. When we enable anyone it is false sympathy which is never helpful. Our interference may, in fact, be taking their classroom away from them. Our only responsibility is to accept the Atonement (the healing) for ourselves. Yes, we continue to offer support to others as guided, but we do so while still remembering who they are and holding the peace within ourselves. Thus we become a messenger of peace.
We remember today to call on God when we experience feelings of fear and vulnerability. We remind ourselves that we can't be endangered, because the truth is that we are already home with God. Calling on God is simply a reminder of that truth. Our reality is perfectly safe and protected. Feel His embrace. Nothing can touch you where you are actually at home in the mind, outside of the dream. Set your focus in the morning to remember to go through the day with the lesson firmly implanted in your mind, and whenever any kind of fear comes up, any kind of anxiety, nervousness, or frustration where you feel your security threatened in any way, remember to call on God and to feel yourself resting in His embrace, forever safe, loved and happy. Nothing can reach you or harm you in this place. Calling on God is to remember the truth about ourselves. When we feel in any kind of danger, calling on the ego means we think we know what it is we need to save ourselves. All that does is take us further from the truth and keep us rooted in the dream.
Love and blessings, Sarah
[email protected]
The quotes in this article are from the Foundation for Inner Peace edition, with the reference cited. There is also the quote references for similar quotes in the ACIM Original Edition.
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1 Take pity on yourselves, so long enslaved. Rejoice whom God hath joined have come together and need no longer look on sin apart. No two can look on sin together, for they could never see it in the same place and time. Sin is a strictly individual perception, seen in the other yet believed by each to be within himself. And each one seems to make a different error, and one the other cannot understand. Brothers, it is the same, made by the same, and forgiven for its maker in the same way.
2 The holiness of your relationship forgives you both, undoing the effects of what you both believed and saw. And with their going is the need for sin gone with them. Who has need for sin? Only the lonely and alone who see their brothers different from themselves. It is this difference, seen but not real, that makes the need for sin, not real but seen, seem justified. And all this would be real if sin were so. For an unholy relationship is based on differences, where each one thinks the other has what he has not. They come together, each to complete himself and rob the other. They stay until they think there's nothing left to steal and then move on. And so they wander through a world of strangers unlike themselves, living with their bodies perhaps under a common roof that shelters neither-in the same room and yet a world apart.
3 A holy relationship starts from a different premise. Each one has looked within and seen no lack. Accepting his completion, he would extend it by joining with another, whole as himself. He sees no difference between these selves, for differences are only of the body. Therefore, he looks on nothing he would take. He denies not his own reality, because it is the truth. Just under Heaven does he stand, but close enough not to return to earth. For this relationship has Heaven's holiness. How far from home can a relationship so like to Heaven be?
4 Think what a holy relationship can teach! Here is belief in differences undone. Here is the faith in differences shifted to sameness. [And here is sight of differences transformed to vision.] And reason now can lead you to the logical conclusion of your union. It must extend, as you extended when you joined. It must reach out beyond itself, as you reached out beyond the body to let yourselves be joined. And now the sameness which you saw extends and finally removes all sense of differences so that the sameness that lies beneath them all becomes apparent. Here is the golden circle where you recognize the Son of God. For what is born into a holy relationship can never end.
II. The Message of the Holy Relationship
5 Let reason take another step. If you attack whom God would heal and hate the one He loves, then you and your Creator have a different will. Yet if you are his Will, what you must then believe is that you are not yourself. You can indeed believe this, and you do. And you have faith in this and see much evidence on its behalf. And where, you wonder, does your strange uneasiness, your sense of being disconnected, and your haunting fear of lack of meaning in yourself arise? It is as though you wandered in without a plan of any kind except to wander off, for only that seems certain.
6 Yet we have heard a very similar description earlier, but it was not of you. And yet this strange idea, which it does accurately describe, you think is you. Reason would tell you that the world you see through eyes which are not yours must make no sense to you. To whom would vision such as this send back its messages? Surely not you, whose sight is wholly independent of the eyes which look upon the world. If this is not your vision, what can it show to you? The brain cannot interpret what your vision sees. This you would understand. The brain interprets to the body, of which it is a part. But what it says, you cannot understand. Yet you have listened to it. And long and hard you tried to understand its messages. You did not realize it is impossible to understand what fails entirely to reach you.
7 You have received no messages at all you understand. For you have listened to what can never communicate at all. Think, then, what happened. Denying what you are and firm in faith that you are something else, this "something else" which you have made to be yourself became your sight. Yet it must be the "something else" which sees, and as not you, explains its sight to you. Your vision would, of course, render this quite unnecessary. Yet if your eyes are closed and you have called upon this thing to lead you, asking it to explain to you the world it sees, you have no reason not to listen nor to suspect that what it tells you is not true. Reason would tell you it cannot be true because you do not understand it. God has no secrets. He does not lead you through a world of misery, waiting to tell you at the journey's end why He did this to you.
8 What could be secret from God's Will? Yet you believe that you have secrets. What could your secrets be except another will that is your own, apart from His? Reason would tell you that this is no secret that need be hidden as a sin. But a mistake indeed! Let not your fear of sin protect it from correction, for the attraction of guilt is only fear. Here is the one emotion that you made, whatever it may seem to be. This is the emotion of secrecy, of private thoughts, and of the body. This is the one emotion that opposes love and always leads to sight of differences and loss of sameness. Here is the one emotion that keeps you blind, dependent on the self you think you made to lead you through the world it made for you.
9 Your sight was given you, along with everything that you can understand. You will perceive no difficulty in understanding what this vision tells you, for everyone sees only what he thinks he is. And what your sight would show you, you will understand because it is the truth. Only your vision can convey to you what you can see. It reaches you directly without a need to be interpreted to you. What needs interpretation must be alien. Nor will it ever be made understandable by an interpreter you cannot understand.
10 Of all the messages you have received and failed to understand, this course alone is open to your understanding and can be understood. This is your language. You do not understand it yet, only because your whole communication is like a baby's. The sounds a baby makes and what he hears are highly unreliable, meaning different things to him at different times. Neither the sounds he hears nor sights he sees are stable yet. But what he hears and does not understand will be his native tongue, through which he will communicate with those around him, and they with him. And the strange, shifting ones he sees about him will become to him his comforters, and he will recognize his home and see them there with him.
11 So in each holy relationship is the ability to communicate instead of separate reborn. Yet a holy relationship, so recently reborn itself from an unholy relationship and yet more ancient than the old illusion that it has replaced, is like a baby now in its rebirth. Yet in this infant is your vision returned to you, and he will speak the language both of you can understand. He is not nurtured by the "something else" you thought was you. He was not given there, nor was received by anything except yourself. For no two people can unite except through Christ, Whose vision sees them one.
12 Think what is given you, my holy brothers. This child will teach you what you do not understand and make it plain. For his will be no alien tongue. He will need no interpreter to you, for it was you who taught him what he knows because you knew it. He could not come to anyone but you, never to "something else." Where Christ has entered, no one is alone, for never could He find a home in separate ones. Yet must He be reborn into His ancient home, so seeming new and yet as old as He, a tiny newcomer, dependent on the holiness of your relationship to let Him live.
13 Be certain God did not entrust His Son to the unworthy. Nothing but what is part of Him is worthy of being joined. Nor is it possible that anything not part of Him can join. Communication must have been restored to those that join, for this they could not do through bodies. What, then, has joined them? Reason will tell you that they must have seen each other through a vision not of the body and communicated in a language the body does not speak. Nor could it be a fearful sight or sound that drew them gently into one. Rather, in each the other saw a perfect shelter where his Self could be reborn in safety and in peace. Such did his reason tell him; such he believed because it was the truth.
14 Here is the first direct perception that you have made. You made it through awareness older than perception and yet reborn in just an instant. For what is time to what was always so? Think what that instant brought-the recognition that the "something else" you thought was you is an illusion. And truth came instantly to show you where your Self must be. It is denial of illusions that calls on truth, for to deny illusions is to recognize that fear is meaningless. Into the holy home, where fear is powerless, love enters thankfully, grateful that it is one with you who joined to let it enter.
15 Christ comes to what is like Himself; the same, not different. For He is always drawn unto Himself. What is as like Him as a holy relationship? And what draws you together draws Him to you. Here are His sweetness and His gentle innocence protected from attack. And here can He return in confidence, for faith in one another is always faith in Him. You are indeed correct in looking on each other as His chosen home, for here you will with Him and with His Father. This is your Father's Will for you, and yours with His. And who is drawn to Christ is drawn to God as surely as both are drawn to every holy relationship, the home prepared for them as earth is turned to Heaven.
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To GIVE and to RECEIVE are One in Truth. Lesson 108
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