MANUAL FOR TEACHERS
#13. WHAT IS THE REAL MEANING OF SACRIFICE?
1 Although in truth the term sacrifice is altogether meaningless, it does have meaning in the world. Like all things in the world, its meaning is temporary and will ultimately fade into the nothingness from which it came when there is no more use for it. Now its real meaning is a lesson. Like all lessons, it is an illusion, for in reality there is nothing to learn. Yet this illusion must be replaced by a corrective device, another illusion that replaces the first, so both can finally disappear. The first illusion, which must be displaced before another thought system can take hold, is that it is a sacrifice to give up the things of this world. What could this be but an illusion, since this world itself is nothing more than that?
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A COURSE IN MIRACLES
WORKBOOK for STUDENTS
Voice and Music by CIMS SonShip Radio
A miracle is a correction. It
does not create, nor really change at all.
It merely looks on devastation, and
reminds the mind that what it sees is false.
It undoes error, but does not attempt
to go beyond perception, nor exceed
the function of forgiveness. Thus it stays
within time's limits. Yet it paves the way
for the return of timelessness and love's
awakening, for fear must slip away
under the gentle remedy it gives.
A miracle contains the gift of grace,
for it is given and received as one.
And thus it illustrates the law of truth
the world does not obey, because it fails
entirely to understand its ways.
A miracle inverts perception, which
was upside-down before, and thus it ends
the strange distortions that were manifest.
Now is perception open to the truth.
Now is forgiveness fully justified.
Forgiveness is the home of miracles.
The eyes of Christ delivers them to all
they look upon in mercy and in love.
Perception stands corrected in His sight,
and what was meant to curse has come to bless.
Each lily of forgiveness offers all
the world the silent miracle of love.
And each is laid before the Word of God
upon the universal altar to
Creator and creation, in the Light
of perfect purity and endless peace.
The miracle is taken first on faith,
because to ask for it implies the mind
has been made ready to conceive of what
it cannot see and does not understand.
Yet faith will bring its witnesses, to show
that what it rested on is really there.
And thus the miracle will justify your faith
in it, and show it rested on a world
more real than what you saw before;
a world redeemed from what you thought you saw.
Miracles fall like drops of healing rain
from Heaven on a dry and dusty world,
where starved and thirsty creatures came to die.
Now have they water. Now the world is green.
And everywhere the signs of life spring up,
to show that what is born can never die,
for what has life has immortality.
~ Original Hand Script
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A COURSE IN MIRACLES
DAILY LESSONS
L e s s o n 350
Miracles mirror God's eternal Love.
To offer them is to remember Him, And through His memory to save the world.
Voice and Music by CIMS SonShip Radio
What we forgive becomes a part of us,
as we perceive ourselves. The Son of God
incorporates all things within himself
as You created him. Your memory
depends on his forgiveness. What he is,
is unaffected by his thoughts. But what
he looks upon is their direct result.
Therefore, my Father, I would turn to You.
Only Your memory will set me free.
And only my forgiveness teaches me
to let Your memory return to me,
and give it to the world in thankfulness.
And as we gather miracles from Him,
we will indeed be grateful. For as we
remember Him, His Son will be restored
to us in the Reality of Love.
.
~ Original Handscript of ACIM
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ACIM Edmonton - Sarah's Reflections
LESSON 350
Miracles mirror God's eternal Love.
To offer them is to remember Him, and
Through His memory to save the world
.
Sarah's Commentary:
When we offer our brothers forgiveness instead of attack by being willing to bring our unforgiving thoughts to the right mind where truth resides, we experience a reflection of God's Love. This is how we remember Him and thus remember who we are. Memory of God depends on forgiving our brothers. Through forgiveness, we see our brothers are the same as ourselves. Our memories of past difficulties and grievances are wiped away. The mirror of our minds has now been polished and only innocence is reflected. All the differences we have perceived are not the truth.
Everyone is a part of us. In fact, everyone is ourselves. In our attacks on "others," we are saying they are different and sinful and not a part of us. This is how we maintain the separation, which is attractive to us because the ego lives on differences and comparisons. We like to see ourselves as special and better than others. We want to hold them responsible for our lack of peace and happiness. If only they had not said or done that, we would not have to hold them responsible for how we are feeling. Yet betrayal is what the ego thrives on because in betrayal it sees itself as the victim of what others have done. Victimhood is valued by the ego because it shows God how unfairly treated we are and asks that His punishment fall on those who have seemingly betrayed us. We are very much invested in our values and opinions. Judgment is the oxygen of the ego and maintains our individual, separate self. To forgive is to remember that we want truth more than we want to be right about ourselves.
Jesus reminds us that there is no world. It is all a dream we are dreaming, and our experiences in the world are just an outward picture of our inward condition. We don't see it that way because we prefer to see guilt in our brothers, rather than in our own minds. The ego has made us believe that by seeing our brother guilty we can release our guilt, but this is a lie. All that happens is that when we hold our brothers guilty, we keep ourselves locked in that same guilt. The onerous burden of guilt in our minds comes from the belief that we have left our home in Heaven. The ego has come up with a solution---get rid of our guilt by projecting it onto others. It is the master plan of the insane ego and is brilliantly constructed to keep us tied to the illusion. This is how the separation is maintained and how we keep ourselves in misery by our own decision because the ego has no power except what we give it.
"What he is, is unaffected by his thoughts. But what he looks upon is their direct result."
(W.350.1.4-5) In other words, whatever our thoughts are about our brother, they do not affect who he is. It does not matter what we think of his behavior and how guilty we judge him to be. The truth is that his innocence is guaranteed by God, just the same as our own. He is not his behavior nor his story. The truth in him is changeless, as it is in us. Our identity as the Christ is totally serene and unaffected by anything that seems to be going on in our dream.
In this dream, we believe that what we see is reality because our senses convince us that our perceptions are true. We believe our thoughts and opinions. Until we question their reality, it is the only thing we know. We have lost awareness of who we are in truth but having lost awareness does not mean the truth is not in us and in everyone. The only way back to the truth of who we are is to recognize who our brother is. Through our shared purpose, we join in a holy encounter and remember our Oneness. We can never join in a story or in the drama of life.
As Jeff Foster wrote:
"I will always listen deeply to you but I will never fix you, mend you, stop you feeling what you are feeling or give you second hand memorized answers. I will never pretend to be the one who knows, the enlightened one or some missionary for a conceptual truth far removed from real time, immediate first hand present experience. I will not get into drama with you, I will not indulge and feed your stories and mental conclusions and fears, I will not mistake who you are for my story about you, my dream of who you are. But friend I will meet you in the fires of hell, I will hold your hand there, I will walk with you as far as you need to walk, and not turn away, for you are my Self and in the deepest recesses of our experience we are intimately each other and we cannot pretend otherwise."
This is the way back to remembering God. The memory of who we are will only return when we will to see the truth in everyone and let go of our fear and guilt based on the ego's lies. We have accepted the lies of the ego as true---that we have sinned, are guilty, and will be punished. We hold these thoughts and beliefs as truth, but now we are called to question them. We can see what we think and believe by the effects of our thoughts. The effects are our projections. If we want to know what we think and believe, we just need to look at our projections. Our projections show us our wrong-minded thinking. When we take responsibility for our thoughts and beliefs and take them back into the mind, we can choose to lay them before the feet of truth. Thus, space is made for a new perception. As we join in the Oneness of Christ, it transcends the sum of its parts into a glorious whole. Separation is left behind, if only for a brief moment, but that is sufficient for now.
As our fear and resistance are reduced, we accept what Jesus offers us more and more and are increasingly willing to surrender our way and experience the miracle. And for that, we can be truly grateful. "Only Your memory will set me free. And only my forgiveness teaches me to let Your memory return to me, and give it to the world in thankfulness." (W.350.1.7-8)
Miracles shift the mind from the beliefs we now hold about ourselves to the recognition that we are eternal beings of light and love, created by God. We have never changed our reality because it is not possible for us to do so. We have only lost awareness of it. The body and our experience of this world are not what life is. Jesus reminds us that the world of the ego is nothing. "It has no meaning. It does not exist. Do not try to understand it because, if you do, you are believing that it can be understood and is therefore capable of being appreciated and loved. That would justify its existence, which cannot be justified. You cannot make the meaningless meaningful. This can only be an insane attempt." (T.7.VI.11.4.6-11) (ACIM OE T.7.VII.66)
Jesus is helping us to see the false as false. When we look at the ego with honesty and courage and without judgment, its unreality becomes apparent and the truth beyond is glimpsed. He tells us, "No one can escape from illusions unless he looks at them, for not looking is the way they are protected." (T.11.V.1) (ACIM OE T.10.VI.39) We have to look first at the "dynamics" of the ego before we can see beyond it. Clearly, that which looks is not the ego. Awareness is the dreamer, outside this dream, and thus, we make the ego real in our minds by not looking at it.
Our work in the Course must consist of watching our thoughts, our values, our beliefs, and our stories and not justifying our positions but investigating the "I" holding these thoughts. The temptation simply to dismiss the ego and the world as just an illusion while still believing in it is not helpful to our healing. Neither can we readily do whatever we want by dismissing our actions as unimportant because it is all a dream. As long as the mind believes in the dream, our unkind acts will register more guilt in our minds. Thoughts have power. That is why Jesus says that there are no idle thoughts. Although what we are is unaffected by our thoughts, our thoughts nevertheless keep the memory of God from our awareness. Through forgiveness, the memory of who we are will be restored to us. A miracle and forgiveness are alike in that they both simply remind the mind that what it sees is false.
Offering miracles is our function on this earth and best reflects God's Love in this world, As the Lesson title says, "Miracles mirror God's eternal love. To offer them is to remember Him. And through His memory to save the world." (W.350) Miracles pave the way to the memory of God in our right minds. The memory of Him is restored to us when we extend forgiveness. This is the process we are given in this Course for relinquishing the ego.
"Only Your memory will set me free. And only my forgiveness teaches me to let Your memory return to me, and give it to the world in thankfulness."
(W.350.1.7-8)
Love and blessings, Sarah
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#13. What is the Real Meaning of Sacrifice?
1 Although in truth the term sacrifice is altogether meaningless, it does have meaning in the world. Like all things in the world, its meaning is temporary and will ultimately fade into the nothingness from which it came when there is no more use for it. Now its real meaning is a lesson. Like all lessons, it is an illusion, for in reality there is nothing to learn. Yet this illusion must be replaced by a corrective device, another illusion that replaces the first, so both can finally disappear. The first illusion, which must be displaced before another thought system can take hold, is that it is a sacrifice to give up the things of this world. What could this be but an illusion, since this world itself is nothing more than that?
2 It takes great learning both to realize and to accept the fact that the world has nothing to give. What can the sacrifice of nothing mean? It cannot mean that you have less because of it. There is no sacrifice in the world's terms that does not involve the body. Think a while about what the world calls sacrifice. Power, fame, money, physical pleasure-who is the hero to whom all these things belong? Could they mean anything except to a body? Yet a body cannot evaluate. By seeking after such things, the mind associates itself with the body, obscuring its identity and losing sight of what it really is.
3 Once this confusion has occurred, it becomes impossible for the mind to understand that all the "pleasures" of the world are nothing. But what a sacrifice-and it is sacrifice indeed-all this entails! Now has the mind condemned itself to seek without finding, to be forever dissatisfied and discontented, to know not what it really wants to find. Who can escape this self-condemnation? Only through God's Word could this be possible. For self-condemnation is a decision about identity, and no one doubts what he believes he is. He can doubt all things but never this.
4 God's teachers can have no regret on giving up the pleasures of the world. Is it a sacrifice to give up pain? Does an adult resent the giving up of children's toys? Does one whose vision has already glimpsed the face of Christ look back with longing on a slaughter house? No one who has escaped the world and all its ills looks back on it with condemnation. Yet he must rejoice that he is free of all the sacrifice which its value would demand of him. To them he sacrifices all his freedom. To them he sacrifices all his peace. And to possess them must he sacrifice his hope of Heaven and remembrance of his Father's Love. Who in his sane mind chooses nothing as a substitute for everything?
5 What is the real meaning of sacrifice? It is the cost of believing in illusions. It is the price that must be paid for the denial of truth. There is no pleasure of the world that does not demand this, for otherwise the pleasure would be seen as pain. And no one asks for pain if he recognizes it. It is the idea of sacrifice that makes him blind. He does not see what he is asking for. And so he seeks it in a thousand ways and in a thousand places, each time believing it is there and each time disappointed in the end. "Seek but do not find," remains this world's stern decree, and no one who pursues the world's goals can do otherwise.
6 You may believe this course requires sacrifice of all you really hold dear. In one sense that is true, for you hold dear the things that crucify God's Son. And it is the course's aim to set him free. But do not be mistaken about what sacrifice means. It always means the giving up of what you want. And what, oh teacher of God, is it that you want? You have been called by God, and you have answered. Would you now sacrifice that Call? Few have heard it as yet, and they can but turn to you. There is no other hope in all the world that they can trust. There is no other voice in all the world that echoes God's. If you would sacrifice the truth, they stay in hell. And if they stay, you will remain with them.
7 Do not forget that sacrifice is total. There are no "half sacrifices." You cannot give up Heaven partially. You cannot be a little bit in hell. The Word of God has no exceptions. It is this that makes it holy and beyond the world. It is its holiness that points to God. It is its holiness that makes you safe. It is denied if you attack any brother for anything. For it is here the split with God occurs. A split that is impossible. A split that cannot happen. Yet a split in which you surely will believe, because you have set up a situation that is impossible. And in this situation the impossible can seem to happen. It seems to happen at the "sacrifice" of truth.
8 Teacher of God, do not forget the meaning of sacrifice, and remember what each decision you make must mean in terms of cost. Decide for God, and everything is given you at no cost at all. Decide against Him, and you choose nothing at the expense of the awareness of everything. What would you teach? Remember only what you would learn. For it is here that your concern should be. Atonement is for you. Your learning claims it, and your learning gives it. The world contains it not, but learn this course and it is yours. God holds out His Word to you, for He has need of teachers. What other way is there to save His Son?
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