Here are the first 3 paragraphs of Lesson 152:

Lesson 152, “The Power of Decision Is My Own,” was explored as a profound reminder that salvation is found at the level of the mind, not in changing the circumstances of the world. The lesson begins with uncompromising statements: no one suffers pain, grief, fear, sickness, or death without having chosen the underlying thought system that gives those experiences meaning. This can sound harsh or extreme if understood as a claim that an individual personality consciously chooses every event in form. The group emphasized that the Course is speaking instead about the mind’s fundamental choice between the ego and the Holy Spirit. The decision-making mind—not the body or the personal self—chooses how experience will be interpreted.

The ego persuades us that the world is outside us and that its events determine our inner state. We believe illness, aging, loss, conflict, pain, and other people’s behavior cause fear or unhappiness. The Course reverses this apparent sequence. The world is the projection or reflection of a prior choice in the mind. When we choose the ego, we see a world of separation, vulnerability, victimhood, and conflict. When we choose the Holy Spirit for our interpretation of the world, the forms may still appear much the same, but their meaning changes. Rather than proof that we are abandoned, guilty, or threatened, they can become opportunities to remember that peace remains available by forgiving ourselves for wanting to be separate, and choosing a masochistic thought system that needs a constant supply of blame targets, even though the crime it accuses everyone of is impossible in truth.

This distinction is especially important in confronting sickness, aging, and death. Several participants spoke candidly about physical pain, medical conditions, memory loss, fear of dying, and the practical use of medication. The discussion did not suggest denying symptoms or refusing helpful treatment. “Magic,” in Course terminology, may still be useful at the level of form when it is approached with kindness rather than panic or guilt. Taking medicine, seeking medical advice, or making a practical decision can be a loving response within the dream. The important question is not whether one does something in form, but which teacher (either ego or Holy Spirit) we ask to interpret the situation.

One participant described asking Jesus for help during a painful episode—not necessarily for a miraculous change in the body, but for guidance about how to proceed. This led to a practical insight about what might help with the pain without causing unwanted side effects. The experience illustrated a central point: the Holy Spirit does not manipulate form to help us. Help comes through a shift in purpose and perception. We can make sensible choices while recognizing that our peace does not ultimately depend on the outcome.

The group also reflected on the Course’s use of the word “oblivion.” From the ego’s perspective, bodily decline, forgetfulness, or death can seem terrifyingly close to annihilation. Yet in the Course’s metaphysics, the whole world of separation is already a kind of oblivion: an attempt to extinguish awareness of God, love, our true Identity. We cannot actually destroy that awareness, but we can believe we have hidden it. Therefore, the most meaningful alternative to oblivion is not preserving the body forever; it is becoming less lost in the body and more aware of ourselves as mind. Looking at fear with Jesus, without judgment, makes it possible to be aware of fear without being entirely defined by it.

This was described as being “unafraidly afraid”: allowing fear to be present without adding condemnation, denial, or further fear. The ego’s currency is fear, while the Holy Spirit’s response is forgiveness. Looking at fear with forgiveness does not pretend it is absent. It acknowledges the experience honestly while declining to make it proof of reality, guilt, or separation. This nonjudgmental awareness can be deeply consoling. A frightened person may still seem to be present, but one is no longer completely imprisoned within that identity.

Lesson 152 (and the entire Course) insists that truth cannot have exceptions. If truth is true, then its opposite cannot also be true. Love and perfect holiness cannot coexist with fear, sickness, loss, and death as ultimate realities. The ego finds this difficult, even offensive, because it wants some parts of its world to remain real. It may give lip service to the idea that truth is true in an abstract way, but always vehemently resists the further implication that nothing else is true. The ego wants contrast: some pleasure better than some pain, some situations safer than others, some forms more valuable than others. It treats these comparisons as proof that the world matters.

The Course, however, makes a “vertical” distinction rather than a worldly (“horizontal“) one: truth versus illusion, reality versus unreality. The Holy Spirit does not ask us to compare one illusion with another to find salvation. An improved circumstance may be welcome, but it is not the same as peace. Both favorable and unfavorable situations can be used by the ego to reinforce separation. The real contrast is between the restless, judgmental ego state and the quiet peace that reflects our true home in God.

We can experience peace in our ordinary lives by allowing every specific situation to be part of our forgiveness curriculum. “Resting in God” is not dramatic or mystical. It may appear simply as a clear mind, a settled heart, a lack of preoccupation, and a quiet capacity to do everyday things. One may wash dishes, take a walk, or speak with another person while feeling inwardly at rest. When agitation, resentment, urgency, or anxiety returns, the contrast can serve as useful information. Rather than evidence of failure, an upset is like a rumble strip on the road: a signal that the mind has drifted and can be gently redirected.

The group extended this metaphor playfully. Ideally, one notices the rumble strip before reaching the curb, scraping the wheel, or crashing into the guardrail. But even the guardrail is helpful if it leads to a new choice. The Holy Spirit provides no final dead end. There are always additional “safety nets,” no matter how far we seem to have wandered into guilt or distress. The recurring Course reminder—“I am never upset for the reason I think”—is always available. It invites us to pause, question our interpretation, and become willing to see peace instead.

The lesson’s teaching that all transitory states are false raised an important concern. If grief, pain, and misery are not ultimately true, does that minimize or dismiss lived experience? Definitely not. The Course does not ask us to use metaphysics as a spiritual bypass. It meets us in the condition in which we believe ourselves to be. We must look honestly at what seems to be happening, including suffering and fear, but look with the Holy Spirit rather than with judgment. Metaphysics functions as a diagnostic tool: it helps us recognize that our real problem is not an event in the world but the mind’s belief that it is separate from God, or more accurately, our wanting to be a separate self.

This perspective does not deny that violence, loss, illness, and fear seem to occur. It changes their meaning. Instead of asking how to prove that the world is unreal, we can ask what our upset reveals about the thought system we have chosen. The only two thought systems are: (1) the insanity of the ego, or (2) the sane correction of the Holy Spirit. The body may still feel discomfort, just as a mosquito bite may still itch, but suffering about the discomfort can be transformed. We need not deny the experience; we need only become willing to question the story we attach to it.

The lesson also redefines humility and arrogance. The ego’s usual version of humility is to see oneself as small, weak, sinful, guilty, ashamed, and at the mercy of forces beyond one’s control. Yet the Course calls this arrogance because it treats our own judgment about what we are as truer than God’s. To accept ourselves as little, damaged, or guilty is to claim that we have successfully changed what God created. True humility is the opposite: accepting our rightful place as God’s changeless, innocent, loving Son. This is not self-inflation or spiritual grandiosity. It is the quiet acknowledgment that truth is true and that we did not create ourselves.

The ego is arrogant not only when it boasts but also when it suffers self-righteously. It can wear what one participant called a “crown of suffering,” treating depression, anxiety, victimhood, and unfair treatment as evidence of specialness. It may make a large identity from pain, shame, or spiritual accomplishment. Even becoming proud of being a Course student (or comparing ourselves with other Course students or anyone else) can be another ego strategy. The corrective is not to attack the ego, body, or self-concept. They are not evil, sinful, or wicked; they are simply mistaken and, in that sense, silly. Ken Wapnick frequently reminds us that choosing the ego is just silly and not deserving of condemnation, but rather, patience and gentleness. Condemning others (which is always projection of our own hidden self-condemnation) only makes the ego seem more real and formidable.

Behind many forms of upset lies a painful thought: “I hate being what I am.” A perceived attack from another person may trigger anger and the urge to retaliate, but beneath this is often self-hatred, guilt, or shame. We feel bad about ourselves and then project the cause onto someone else. These self-condemning thoughts and feelings actually are at a deep, ontological level, but seem to involve specifics in our world because our egos will do anything to keep us from seeing the real source of our misery – our wanting to identify with it! Forgiveness means using the experience as a mirror. We do not have to explain it away or force ourselves into positivity. We bring the feeling to Jesus or the Holy Spirit and allow its deeper meaning to be revealed. When the shift occurs, we may find that the suffering self temporarily disappears into a more peaceful awareness. This does not necessarily change external circumstances, but it demonstrates that the insane ego identity built on guilt was never true.

The power of decision is therefore our way home. In Heaven, no decision between thought systems is needed, because only truth exists. But once the tiny mad idea of separation seemed to arise, the decision maker became the means of returning. Our responsibility is not to fix the world or force ourselves to feel spiritual. It is to recognize that we have been choosing the ego’s interpretation and to ask for help in choosing again. The Holy Spirit, Jesus, or God can be understood in the way most helpful to us; what matters is learning not to rely on the ego to interpret our experience.

The lesson’s practice is simple: begin the day (or any moment) by reminding ourselves, “The power of decision is my own. ⁴This day I will accept myself as what my Father’s Will created me to be.” (ACIM, W-152.11:3-4). Then wait quietly, letting self-deceptions be laid aside. Throughout the day, or when the initially inevitable mind-wandering occurs, patiently repeat the invitation. God’s Voice will replace frantic thoughts with peace, self-deceptions with truth, and the illusion of a separate self with the remembrance of our all-inclusive shared identity; the undifferentiated being that is eternally innocent and inseparable.

The movement from “my own” to “our own” matters. The decision is never private in its effects. To recognize the Son of God – our all-inclusive shared identity – in oneself implies recognizing Him in everyone. Because we tend to exclude certain people or groups from this mental blessing, it initially seems impossible. But the Course asks us to consider that perhaps the ego’s condemning verdict of guilt onto everyone is actually what is impossible. Forgiveness welcomes back those whom we have excluded through judgment. As we turn toward the light, we do not create the warmth and luminance ourselves; we simply receive and share the radiant inner light that we are always given. The lesson closes not with pressure to achieve perfection, but with an invitation to rest: to choose, again and again, the peace of God in place of the frantic ego thought system.

Editor’s note: Above is an edited AI (ChatGPT) generated summary of an abridged text transcript of the YouTube recording. I’m still exploring the use of AI to summarize and organize lengthy text material. If you find this helpful, or have any suggestions or thoughts about the content above, please let me know. Your feedback is always appreciated! My intention is to provide useful insights and information related to ACIM. I found this summary quite good and didn’t change much; just a few minor adjustments and additions to enhance clarity and coherence with the Course’s teachings.

(This conversation was facilitated by Bruce Rawles as part of the School For A Course In Miracles (SFACIM) curriculum hosted by Lyn Corona and Tim Wise. This YouTube video recording was made on Monday, June 1, 2026.)

The post The power of decision is my own (Workbook Lesson 152) SFACIM class conversation with Bruce Rawles first appeared on ACIM blog.

Recovering Bliss-ninny Calendar – newly updated for 2027!

Calling all recovering bliss-ninnies! Here is a newly updated calendar for students of A Course In Miracles (ACIM) who want reminders of the thought system we’re here to undo, featuring a few of the more challenging quotes from ACIM with photographs (mostly around Castle Rock, Colorado, and other Rocky Mountain locations, including Alberta, Canada) by Bruce Rawles, editor of ACIMblog.com. Kenneth Wapnick said, “A bliss-ninny doesn’t want to look at guilt or what the world is really like. A person will say, ‘Oh, the Course is changing my life; it’s going to change the world,’ without really looking at the guilt the Course is trying to undo. A bliss-ninny does not have a proper understanding or respect for the ego in terms of how ugly it can be and how attracted to it we are. If you don’t look at guilt, everything you do with this Course is going to be guided by that decision, and you will totally misunderstand what the Course is saying.” The quote was from Susan Dugan’s excellent interview with Ken, which you can read here. While most students of ACIM probably aren’t in the ‘clinically pathological bliss-ninny’ category (grin), we all have our favorite idols of specialness in the world that we think will make us happy. So, even if you only have a few residual ‘special projects’ to repair this surreal holodeck with the intent of turning the dream into your bliss factory, you might find the quotes on the calendar helpful. If you stand back far enough, you can always just look at the photos when the resistance is high to directly let the meaning of the quotes sink in, letting them work subliminally. :-)

Here are the quotes from the Recovering Bliss-ninny calendar:

Cover:

“The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so.” (ACIM, T-13.in.2:2-3)

January:

“I am responsible for what I see. I choose the feelings I experience, and I decide upon the goal I would achieve.” (ACIM, T-21.II.2:3-4)

February:

“You are still convinced that your understanding is a powerful contribution to the truth, and makes it what it is.” (ACIM, T-18.IV.7:5)

March:

“You will become increasingly aware that a slight twinge of annoyance is nothing but a veil drawn over intense fury.” (ACIM, W-21.2:5)

April:

“Beware of the temptation to perceive yourself unfairly treated. In this view, you seek to find an innocence that is not Theirs but yours alone, and at the cost of someone else’s guilt. Can innocence be purchased by the giving of your guilt to someone else?” (ACIM, T-26.X.4:1-3)

May:

“Learn now, without despair, there is no hope of answer in the world. But do not judge the lesson that is but begun with this. Seek not another signpost in the world that seems to point to still another road. No longer look for hope where there is none.” (ACIM, T-31.IV.4:3-6)

June:

“The ego is also in your mind, because you have accepted it there. Its evaluation of you, however, is the exact opposite of the Holy Spirit’s, because the ego does not love you. It is unaware of what you are, and wholly mistrustful of everything it perceives because its perceptions are so shifting. The ego is therefore capable of suspiciousness at best and viciousness at worst.” (ACIM, T-9.VII.3:4-7)

July:

“Learn this, and learn it well, for it is here delay of happiness is shortened by a span of time you cannot realize. You never hate your brother for his sins, but only for your own. Whatever form his sins appear to take, it but obscures the fact that you believe them to be yours, and therefore meriting a ‘just’ attack.” (ACIM, T-31.III.1:4-6)

August:

“But it is pride that argues you have come into a world quite separate from yourself, impervious to what you think, and quite apart from what you chance to think it is. There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach.” (ACIM, W-132.6:1-3)

September:

“What is not love is murder. What is not loving must be an attack. Every illusion is an assault on truth, and every one does violence to the idea of love because it seems to be of equal truth.” (ACIM, T-23.IV.1:10-12)

October:

“If you perceived the special relationship as a triumph over God, would you want it? Let us not think of its fearful nature, nor of the guilt it must entail, nor of the sadness and the loneliness. For these are only attributes of the whole religion of separation, and of the total context in which it is thought to occur.” (ACIM, T-16.V.10:1-3)

November:

“The sick are merciless to everyone, and in contagion do they seek to kill. Death seems an easy price, if they can say, ‘Behold me, brother, at your hand I die.’ For sickness is the witness to his guilt, and death would prove his errors must be sins.” (ACIM, T-27.I.4:5-7)

December:

“If you can be hurt by anything, you see a picture of your secret wishes. ⁹Nothing more than this. ¹⁰And in your suffering of any kind you see your own concealed desire to kill.” (ACIM, T-31.V.15:8-10)

Here is an explanation of ACIM’s annotation system; annotations with links (to the Web Edition of the Course) to read the full quotes in context appear at the end of each quote above.

Purchase the Recovering Bliss-ninny Calendar here.

Here are links and details about two newer calendars with ACIM quotes, much less challenging, too:

• A Course In Miracles: Inspiring Quotes calendar & details
• Humorous quotes lampooning the ego calendar & details

The post 2027 Update: Recovering Bliss-Ninny Wall Calendar first appeared on ACIM blog.

After realizing that the “Recovering Bliss-Ninny Calendar” – available for several years – had some rather challenging quotes from A Course In Miracles, I made a calendar with quotes on the other end of the difficulty spectrum, with lots of soothing, gentle, reassuring, inspiring, encouraging, and uplifting Course quotes: the A Course In Miracles: Inspiring Quotes calendar.

More recently, I added another ACIM quote calendar that perhaps meets us more in the middle, with some humor to make the integration a bit easier: still requiring gentle vigilance of mind, yet the kindly wit of the author that lampoons our egos simultaneously motivates us to choose the real alternative that will provide consistent happiness and peace.

Here are the quotes from the new A Course In Miracles humor: ego lampooned calendar:

January:

Note: Annotations with links (to the Web Edition of the Course so that you can read the full quotes in context) appear at the end of each quote above. Here is an explanation of ACIM’s annotation system;

Purchase the “A Course In Miracles humor: ego lampooned” calendar here.

Here is a version of the calendar without the ACIM quotes if you just want to enjoy some abstract patterns (not colorized) from close-up photography of an abandoned dump truck near the entrance to the mining village ghost town at Ruby, Arizona.

Here are links and details about two prior calendars with ACIM quotes:

• A Course In Miracles: Inspiring Quotes calendar & details
• Recovering Bliss-Ninny calendar & details

The post 2027 Updated ACIM Wall Calendar: Humorous quotes lampooning the ego first appeared on ACIM blog.

Since truth and sooth are synonyms, let’s let the Truth soothe us! We still need to look at our egos – without condemnation! – and slowly (but surely) acknowledge the stark absurdity, atrocity, and inanity of the 100% insane ego. Yet by looking at the gentle, real alternative that waits with infinite patience for our return, we have the perfect contrast to motivate us to drop insanity and restore the peace by forgiving ourselves for the crime of separation that is forever impossible in truth, yet unavoidable in the ego’s interpretation of its own projection.

Here are the quotes from the A Course In Miracles: Inspiring Quotes calendar:

January:

February:

“Can you imagine what it means to have no cares, no worries, no anxieties, but merely to be perfectly calm and quiet all the time?”
T-15.I.1:1

March:

“The word ‘inevitable’ is fearful to the ego, but joyous to the spirit. God is inevitable, and you cannot avoid Him any more than He can avoid you.”
T-4.I.9:10-11

April:

“You have not lost your innocence. It is for this you yearn. This is your heart’s desire. This is the voice you hear, and this the call which cannot be denied.”
W-182.12:1-4

May:

“You are altogether irreplaceable in the Mind of God. No one else can fill your part in it, and while you leave your part of it empty your eternal place merely waits for your return.”
T-9.VIII.10:1-2

June:

“You and your brother are coming home together, after a long and meaningless journey that you undertook apart, and that led nowhere.”
T-18.III.8:5

July:

“Spirit is in a state of grace forever.
Your reality is only spirit.
Therefore you are in a state of grace forever.”
T-1.III.5:4-6

August:

“How can you who are so holy suffer? All your past except its beauty is gone, and nothing is left but a blessing. I have saved all your kindnesses and every loving thought you ever had. I have purified them of the errors that hid their light, and kept them for you in their own perfect radiance. They are beyond destruction and beyond guilt.”
T-5.IV.8:1-5

September:

“You have no idea of the tremendous release and deep peace that comes from meeting yourself and your brothers totally without judgment.”
T-3.VI.3:1

October:

“The still infinity of endless peace surrounds you gently in its soft embrace, so strong and quiet, tranquil in the might of its Creator, nothing can intrude upon the sacred Son of God within.”
T-29.V.2:4

November:

“If peace is eternal, you are at home only in eternity.”
T-5.III.10:8

December:

“What could you not accept, if you but knew that everything that happens, all events, past, present and to come, are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good?”
W-135.18:1

Note: Annotations with links (to the Web Edition of the Course so that you can read the full quotes in context) appear at the end of each quote above. Here is an explanation of ACIM’s annotation system;

Purchase the A Course In Miracles: Inspiring Quotes calendar here.

Here is a version of the calendar without the ACIM quotes if you just want to enjoy some abstract patterns of sand; these are photographs of sand patterns on the beach at Yachats River estuary (and vicinity near Yachats, Oregon) taken May-June 2022.

Here are links and details about two other calendars with ACIM quotes:

• Recovering Bliss-ninny calendar & details
• Humorous quotes lampooning the ego calendar & details

The post 2027 Updated Wall Calendar: A Course In Miracles: Inspiring Quotes first appeared on ACIM blog.

We opened the session with these italicized lines from Lesson 131:

“Today I seek and find all that I want.
My single purpose offers it to me.
No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth.” (ACIM, W-131.15:5-7)

As we identify with nothing that can be threatened, peace is a happy inevitability.

In A Course In Miracles, there are 154 instances of the word “condemn” (or variations of that word).

Here are the first 3 paragraphs of Lesson 198:

Condemn and you are made a prisoner. Forgive and you are freed. Such is the law that rules perception. It is not a law that knowledge understands, for freedom is a part of knowledge. To condemn is thus impossible in truth. What seems to be its influence and its effects have not occurred at all. Yet must we deal with them a while as if they had. Illusion makes illusion. Except one. Forgiveness is illusion that is answer to the rest.

Forgiveness sweeps all other dreams away, and though it is itself a dream, it breeds no others. All illusions save this one must multiply a thousandfold. But this is where illusions end. Forgiveness is the end of dreams, because it is a dream of waking. It is not itself the truth. Yet does it point to where the truth must be, and gives direction with the certainty of God Himself. It is a dream in which the Son of God awakens to his Self and to his Father, knowing They are one.”

(ACIM, W-198.1:1–3:7)

The inherent harmlessness, kindness, patience, grace, tolerance, and gentleness of our unlimited (sane) selves stand in sharp contrast to the ego’s harmfulness, cruelty, impatience, gracelessness, intolerance, and roughshod treatment of our precious siblings. That inappropriate treatment only seemed to occur. In truth, no crime is possible, which is to say that duality is impossible. Perfect Oneness has no opposite, and anything that seems to exist outside it (including everything seemingly separate that would imply a condemnable crime) is made up by the ego’s silly self-inflation. “… God thinks otherwise.” (ACIM, T-23.I.2:7) Our real identity (even if we’re not aware of it much) is still intact; the only bogus identity that disappears when we’re done with our forgiveness lessons is the dream figure that our egos have been projecting into the void of condemning thought. Everyone’s ego is a pathological liar we can afford to not take seriously!

(This conversation was facilitated by Bruce Rawles as part of the School For A Course In Miracles (SFACIM) curriculum hosted by Lyn Corona and Tim Wise. This YouTube video recording was made on Tuesday, May 11, 2026.)

Editor’s note: Below is a minimally edited AI (ChatGPT) generated summary of a (minimally edited) text transcript of the YouTube recording. I’m still exploring the use of AI to summarize and organize lengthy text material. If you find this helpful (or not), please let me know. Your feedback is always appreciated! My intention is to provide useful insights and information related to ACIM. I found this summary quite good and didn’t change it much; just a few minor adjustments to enhance clarity and coherence with the Course’s teachings and a few added links.

In this School For A Course In Miracles class, we explored Workbook Lesson 198, whose central teaching is both wonderfully simple and deeply challenging: “³Only my condemnation injures me. Only my own forgiveness sets me free. (ACIM, W-198.9:3-4) The discussion drew on Kenneth Wapnick’s Journey Through The Workbook of a Course In Miracles and repeatedly returned to the Course’s radical change of mind: what seems to hurt us is never the true cause of our loss of peace. Our pain comes from the meaning we give to events, people, bodies, and circumstances—and, more specifically, from the condemnation in our own mind.

The lesson begins by overturning our ordinary understanding of injury. We normally assume that something outside us—a person’s behavior, an illness, an insult, a loss, a frightening event—causes us to suffer. The Course does not ask us to deny that such experiences seem real and can feel painful. Instead, it asks us to question the ego’s interpretation of them. If our true Identity is as God created It—whole, changeless, innocent, and beyond separation—then nothing in a world of changing forms can actually damage that Identity.

This is not intended as spiritual bypassing or as an instruction to pretend that difficult experiences do not occur. It is an invitation to distinguish between the apparent experience in the dream and the mind’s interpretation of that experience. The body may seem vulnerable, the world may appear unjust, and relationships may bring distress. Yet the Course gently redirects us from trying to solve the problem solely at the level of form to asking a more useful question: What am I choosing to believe about myself, my brother, and God?

The ego’s answer is always some variation on separation. It says that we are bodies, isolated from one another, competing for limited resources, and vulnerable to forces beyond our control. It urges us to look for causes outside ourselves and to make others responsible for our lack of peace. It treats differences as decisive and sameness as irrelevant. From that confused premise, condemnation becomes nearly automatic. If someone else seems guilty, we may feel justified in our anger, fear, resentment, or victimhood. None of these are ever justified in truth, but neither do these emotions merit self-condemnation; we just need to notice when we’re afraid of the peace that is beyond any current resistance to it.

But this apparent victory has a cost. If we believe we can attack, we must also believe that attack has power. If we judge another person as deserving punishment, we reinforce the hidden belief that punishment is real and is deserved by us as well. Our guilt then seems to demand retribution, and we become watchful for the attack we expect to return. The mind projects guilt outward and then fears its own projection. In this sense, condemnation injures us because it preserves the whole thought system of sin, guilt, and fear.

The class emphasized that this is why the Course’s forgiveness is so different from conventional forgiveness. It is not merely a moral decision to overlook another person’s wrongdoing. Nor does it mean approving harmful behavior, abandoning good judgment, or failing to take practical action when action is appropriate. Course-based forgiveness is a change in perception. It is the willingness to bring our judgments to the Holy Spirit and to let their underlying purpose be reinterpreted.

We do not forgive because another person has committed a real sin and we are being generous enough to excuse it. We forgive because the belief in sin is the error that keeps both of us imprisoned. When we hold a grievance, we have assigned someone the role of guilty attacker and ourselves the role of innocent victim. The Course asks us to notice that these roles arise together in the same divided thought system. Releasing our brother from the prison of guilt releases us from the same prison, because minds are joined.

This does not mean we need to force ourselves into a false sense of sweetness, or deny that we are angry. The first step is honesty with ourselves. When we are upset, fearful, resentful, or hurt, we can acknowledge that we are not at peace. Instead of defending the grievance or condemning ourselves for having it, we can bring it to the Inner Kindness Teacher—the Holy Spirit, Jesus, or whatever loving symbol helps us remember that another way of seeing is available. We need only be willing to look without judgment at what the ego has made.

This gentle looking is essential. The ego would have us either act out our grievances or suppress them, both of which reinforce the problem. The Holy Spirit offers another option: observe them with inner kindness, patience, and gentleness, recognizing that everyone is “fighting the same hard battle.” We can mentally stand above the ego battleground rather than remain immersed in it. The important thing is that we are no longer identifying completely with the conflict. We are looking at the thought system of attack with a Teacher who does not condemn us for choosing it.

From this perspective, guilt is not a sin that requires punishment. It is merely a mistaken, impotent belief that can be corrected. The ego insists that our error is grave, permanent, and irreversible. The Course calls it a tiny, mad idea: an impossible attempt to separate from perfect Oneness. That attempt never changed reality, however persuasive its effects may seem within the dream. The error is not evil, wicked, sinful, or beyond repair. It is simply a mistake — and therefore forgivable.

There was much humor in the class, not as a way of making light of suffering, but as a reminder that the ego’s thought system is inherently absurd. The ego tells us to take its judgments very seriously. It magnifies and misinterprets every perceived difference, slight, and upsetting appearance as dangerous. It invents an elaborate murder mystery out of neutral “pixels” of perception, then assigns everyone a role in the drama. Each role is awarded some degree of blame. Egos are not kind to anyone, and this always includes any decision-making mind subscribing to ego’s incessant blame blatherings. The Course does not ask us to make the dream more convincing or to become better managers of its misery. It helps us recognize the interpretation we have added to neutral data and invite a new interpretation. Our Inner Kindness Teacher merely suggests that waking from the dream of misery (duality) is the only real alternative that will ever satisfy us.

The Holy Spirit’s correction does not necessarily remove every difficult form from our experience; it does remove the content, however, when we truly forgive. Physical or psychological symptoms may change, or they may not. The Course’s primary concern is always (content in) the mind. Healing is the release of the belief that a body, event, or circumstance has the power to establish our identity or take away our peace. At the highest level, it does not matter whether the form changes, because peace has been restored at the level of cause.

The Course meets us wherever we seem to be. Sometimes changes on the level of form can serve as helpful symbols of trust, gentleness, or guidance. But they are not the goal. The temptation is to turn the Holy Spirit into a dream-repair technician, asking for particular outcomes while overlooking the deeper gift: the restoration of our awareness that our safety is in the mind. The Holy Spirit’s purpose is not to make the dream permanently comfortable. It is to help us awaken from the belief that the dream is our home.

Lesson 198 also reminds us that the way home is not found in the world. We may spend a lifetime looking for happiness in special relationships, achievements, possessions, recognition, physical security, or control. These may have temporary value in our experience, but none can provide the lasting peace we truly want. A goal must be sought in the direction in which it lies. If we want peace, we cannot find it by pursuing the ego’s agenda of separation, judgment, and attack.

This is good news, even when it initially sounds daunting. We have not actually left our Source. The journey from ourselves does not exist. We may have forgotten Love’s presence, but Love has not departed from us. The outcome of awakening is guaranteed because reality has never been altered. Our task is not to create holiness, earn innocence, or manufacture our own salvation. It is to remove the blocks we have placed before the awareness of what is already true. This requires ever-increasing trust in the sanity of our Real Identity, a.k.a. Holy Spirit, or the Jesus of the Course.

The practical application is beautifully direct. Whenever we notice a condemning thought, we can pause. Instead of following it into another round of analysis, blame, defense, or self-attack, we can ask for help. We can say, in whatever words feel natural: “Holy Spirit, help me see this differently.” Or: “I must have decided wrongly, because I am not at peace. I can decide otherwise.” Or simply: “I want peace instead of this.”

The willingness need not be dramatic. The Course does not demand that we solve the entire separation in one moment. We can work with the particular grievance, irritation, fear, or disappointment in front of us. We can forgive one small judgment at a time. Each time we choose against condemnation, we weaken the ego’s claim that separation is real and strengthen our memory of shared innocence.

This requires repetition, repetition, repetition, and patience. We are deeply habituated to the ego’s interpretation of experience. We may begin the day with a sincere decision for peace and find ourselves lost in judgment by midmorning… or by mid-sentence a moment later. It doesn’t matter; no crime has been registered in eternity. Rather than using that lapse as evidence that we have failed, just make it another classroom for forgiveness. The goal is not perfection in the ego’s sense. The goal is to become increasingly willing to notice when we are not peaceful and to choose again.

Like any meaningful discipline, this mind training takes practice. We do not condemn an athlete for needing repeated training before a skill becomes natural; we can extend the same patience to ourselves. The Course is a curriculum in practical application, not merely a set of uplifting ideas … and astonishing revelations about the absurdity and cruelty of the ego. Its value is discovered as we bring forgiveness into the ordinary moments of the day: the traffic delay, the political argument, the difficult conversation, the anxious diagnosis, the remembered grievance, and the private self-criticism.

The lesson concludes with a vision of freedom in which judgment has been laid aside, and the world’s frantic thought patterns grow quiet. This is not an achievement of personal willpower. It is the gift that becomes available when we stop insisting on the ego’s interpretation and allow forgiveness to do its quiet work. The stillness of our true Self has never been disturbed by the dream of condemnation. It remains untouched, waiting only for our willingness to remember it.

Our mission, then, is simple: notice the condemning thoughts, do not make them sacred, and offer them to the Holy Spirit, who sees them as insignificant, trivial, and negligible – actually non-existent. We can picture our Inner Kindness Teacher gently lifting them from the mind with a pair of tweezers and placing them in a tiny recycling bin, where they can be released rather than morphed into another grievance. Every such moment is a step away from fear and toward the peace that was never truly lost.

Only our condemnation injures us. And only our own forgiveness sets us free.

The post Only my condemnation injures me (Reflections on ACIM workbook lesson 198; SFACIM class conversation) first appeared on ACIM blog.

As in their earlier ACIMblog.com conversation on how healing is accomplished, the emphasis is not on improving the body, rearranging circumstances, or fixing another person. Healing is a change in the mind: a willingness to question the ego’s interpretation of pain, conflict, sickness, and victimhood.

The psychotherapy language is deliberately broadened. The “therapist” can be anyone practicing the Course, and the “patient” is anyone with whom we are in relationship—spouse, child, parent, colleague, neighbor, political opponent, or the person who has just irritated us. These relationships become classrooms in which the mind can notice its investment in separate interests. The real patient, Susan and Bruce remind us, is always the mind that has chosen the ego’s thought system of separation, guilt, judgment, and fear.

This follows the approach of Kenneth Wapnick and the Foundation for A Course in Miracles (FACIM.org): always and only about the mind, our decision-making faculty that chooses constantly between insanity and sanity. Sickness, from this perspective, is not a bodily diagnosis, nor a punishment, nor evidence of spiritual failure. It is the mind’s identification with a vulnerable, guilty, separate self. The body and world then seem to provide convincing evidence that this self is at the mercy of forces outside itself. Yet the Course gently redirects attention to the decision-making mind—the place where we choose between the ego’s interpretation and the Holy Spirit’s correction.

Paraphrasing some wisdom from Ken recently heard on an audio of one of his classes:

We realize how masochistic the ego is when we uncover our secret complicity in wanting atrocities and betrayals to befall us. Worse yet, we insanely relish and relive each abuse and unfairness because that confirms our identity as a righteous suffering self, a majestic martyr, a victorious victim. Separate selfhood is the greatest and most viciously defended crown jewel kept hidden in plain sight in the ego’s highest citadel. A baby cries to get any attention for its separate self; it doesn’t matter if the attention is for “positive“ or ”negative” behavior as long as its individual identity is acknowledged.

We may protest that we want only peace, while unconsciously using grievances to prove that someone else is guilty and that we are innocent by comparison. The ego would always preserve its separate identity at the cost of happiness. Susan brings this lofty metaphysics into daily practice: the lesson is revealed in whatever is “pissing me off at the moment”—a difficult relationship, a political conflict, an anxiety, a bodily symptom, or even a flashing and unwanted computer-screen distraction.

The pivotal opening paragraph of the section says that psychotherapy can be defined simply as forgiveness. The unforgiving mind believes it is unforgiven, shelters guilt, and guards it with alert defense. Healing begins when we hear the mournful inner “dirge” of grievance and begin to question it: perhaps I am not upset for the reason I think. This does not mean denying that cruel behavior or distressing events appear to occur in the world. It means asking why my peace has become dependent on them, and recognizing the projection of guilt that makes another person, body, or circumstance seem to be the cause of my inner condition.

This is closely related to the earlier ACIMblog discussions, including “How is judgment relinquished?” and “Let me perceive forgiveness as it is.”. In each, forgiveness is not conventional pardon, moral superiority, or a spiritualized attempt to overlook real sins. It is a re-evaluation of the belief that sin, guilt, and separation are real. As Wapnick repeatedly taught, the purpose is not to make a better ego or obtain a miraculous rearrangement of form, but to look without judgment—with Jesus or the Holy Spirit beside us—at the guilt we have hidden and projected.

The discussion of sickness and unforgiveness makes this practical. Although forms of upset seem vastly different to us, the Course points to one underlying problem and one correction. A small irritation and a major grievance both allow the mind to see its habitual projection. We need not pretend that there are no differences in the world of form; rather, we learn through experience that every disturbance can serve the same healing purpose. As the ego’s “hierarchy” of problems begins to soften, we become less captivated by the content of our stories and more attentive to the choice of teacher in the mind.

The therapist-patient relationship therefore becomes a symbol for every relationship. We see in another what we have not forgiven in ourselves, and thus are offered another chance to look at it, re-evaluate it, and release it. When we try to fix, diagnose, change, or mentally prosecute the other, we can recognize the projection at work. The useful question is not, “What is wrong with them?” but, “Whose projection is mine to look at?” This is not blame; it is the recovery of responsibility and freedom. The Inner Kindness Teacher does not condemn the mistaken choice, but helps us see that it was only a mistake and can be chosen again.

The conversation ends with the joyous Course principle that no one is healed alone. Seeing another’s innocence and accepting it is a shared release from the belief in sin. This is the same sustained theme of Susan’s work at ForaysInForgiveness.com, which is dedicated to the work of Kenneth Wapnick: forgiveness is a gentle, lifelong practice of bringing the mind’s darkness to the light without judgment. Our everyday classrooms are, as Bruce says, “mathematically perfect.” Whatever confronts us is not a reason to despair, but another invitation to look kindly at what the mind is doing and to remember that we go home together—or not at all.

It is obvious that the reading, while seemingly targeting psychotherapists in clinical settings, applies equally to everyone in every relationship, reminding us of the need to see the sameness masquerading as differences in form and particulars. Here are the paragraphs we read and remarked on from the “Psychotherapy: Purpose, Process and Practice” supplement:

“1. The process of psychotherapy, then, can be defined simply as forgiveness, for no healing can be anything else.²The unforgiving are sick, believing they are unforgiven.³The hanging-on to guilt, its hugging-close and sheltering, its loving protection and alert defense,—all this is but the grim refusal to forgive.⁴“God may not enter here” the sick repeat, over and over, while they mourn their loss and yet rejoice in it.⁵Healing occurs as a patient begins to hear the dirge he sings, and questions its validity.⁶Until he hears it, he cannot understand that it is he who sings it to himself.⁷To hear it is the first step in recovery.⁸To question it must then become his choice.”(ACIM, P-2.VI.1:1-8)

…

“5. Sickness takes many forms, and so does unforgiveness.²The forms of one but reproduce the forms of the other, for they are the same illusion.³So closely is one translated into the other, that a careful study of the form a sickness takes will point quite clearly to the form of unforgiveness that it represents.⁴Yet seeing this will not effect a cure.⁵That is achieved by only one recognition; that only forgiveness heals an unforgiveness, and only an unforgiveness can possibly give rise to sickness of any kind.

6. This realization is the final goal of psychotherapy.²How is it reached?³The therapist sees in the patient all that he has not forgiven in himself, and is thus given another chance to look at it, open it to re-evaluation and forgive it.⁴When this occurs, he sees his sins as gone into a past that is no longer here.⁵Until he does this, he must think of evil as besetting him here and now.⁶The patient is his screen for the projection of his sins, enabling him to let them go.⁷Let him retain one spot of sin in what he looks upon, and his release is partial and will not be sure.

7. No one is healed alone.²This is the joyous song salvation sings to all who hear its Voice.³This statement cannot be too often remembered by all who see themselves as therapists.⁴Their patients can but be seen as the bringers of forgiveness, for it is they who come to demonstrate their sinlessness to eyes that still believe that sin is there to look upon.⁵Yet will the proof of sinlessness, seen in the patient and accepted in the therapist, offer the mind of both a covenant in which they meet and join and are as one.”

(ACIM, P-2.VI.5:1–7:5)

(Underlines added by this author for emphasis; not in the Course itself.)

Whose projection do I need to concern myself with? Mine, of course! Healing is always about accepting the correction in my mind – the undoing of unfounded, unconscious guilt – that forgiveness forever offers us.

(This video was recorded on July 19, 2026.)

If you have questions or comments about this video, previous videos in this ACIM-related video series, or other Course-related topics, please email them to us via the ACIMblog.com contact form. Susan and Bruce will review and try to respond to questions and suggestions for future conversations. We look forward to extending the conversation with you!

If you are interested in Susan’s excellent weekly Tuesday evening classes based on Kenneth Wapnick’s teachings, you can contact her here.

Here are some prior ACIM-related conversations with Susan Dugan and Bruce Rawles.

If you have enjoyed these conversations, here are the latest releases from FACIM. You can also support the work of Susan (ForaysInForgiveness.com) and Bruce (via donation links at the bottom of the sidebars on their respective websites) if you feel so inspired. THANKS!

The post The Definition Of Healing (ACIM; P-2.VI) with Susan Dugan & Bruce Rawles first appeared on ACIM blog.

In A Course In Miracles there are:

• 1865 instances of mind! Wow! Hardly a minor topic! … However, there are only
• 9 instances of mind-wandering specifically … although the whole Course could easily be seen as a curriculum for undoing our prodigal wandering minds!

The first instance of the latter term is here:

“The correction of fear is your responsibility. When you ask for release from fear, you are implying that it is not. You should ask, instead, for help in the conditions that have brought the fear about. These conditions always entail a willingness to be separate. At that level you can help it. You are much too tolerant of mind-wandering, and are passively condoning your mind’s miscreations. The particular result does not matter, but the fundamental error does. The correction is always the same. Before you choose to do anything, ask me if your choice is in accord with mine. If you are sure that it is, there will be no fear.” (ACIM, T-2.VI.4:1-10)

We seem to have massively wandered from Perfect Oneness, yet our beloved Course’s first principle is that “There is no order of difficulty in miracles. (ACIM, T-1.I.1:1). This is true, no matter how bleak and hopeless our “lost” state might seem to be. Since we never left our Source, returning is only an imaginary journey, yet one we find more comfortable to make at our own very slow pace, rather than at a “snap of a finger” which might be interpreted incorrectly as a fearful experience. When insanity is the default state of mind…

“They are already in a fear-weakened state. If they are prematurely exposed to a miracle, they may be precipitated into panic. This is likely to occur when upside-down perception has induced the belief that miracles are frightening.” (ACIM, T-2.IV.4:8-10)

We then reviewed these two lessons that comprise review lesson 146:

1(131) No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth.

(132) I loose the world from all I thought it was.”

(ACIM, W-146.1:1-2)

The Course uses metaphors of the vertical (“undo” correction) and horizontal (ego idiocy of fussing over trivial differences in dream options).

We referenced Ken Wapnick’s (FACIM) workshop on “The Mind’s the Thing,” which relates nicely to our conversation. The liner notes for this audio program reinforce the Course’s persistent, gentle, patient prescription for consistent mindfulness:

“The focus of this program is on the primacy of the mind in both the ego’s and Holy Spirit’s plans of salvation. To the ego, salvation rests on denying the mind and its power, making the Son of God mindless; to the Holy Spirit, salvation comes through the practice of forgiveness, wherein we recognize the ego’s strategy and reverse it so that we can return to the mind and choose again.”

It’s always essential to work on the level of cause rather than effect, avoiding level confusion:

“It is pointless to believe that controlling the outcome of misthought can result in healing. ²When you are fearful, you have chosen wrongly. ³That is why you feel responsible for it. ⁴You must change your mind, not your behavior, and this is a matter of willingness. ⁵You do not need guidance except at the mind level. ⁶Correction belongs only at the level where change is possible. ⁷Change does not mean anything at the symptom level, where it cannot work.” (ACIM, T-2.VI.3:1-7)

Here are more related posts on this website that address level confusion; reversing cause and effect or mixing levels is a widespread, ubiquitous ego strategy to keep us mindless.

Here are the first 3 paragraphs of Lesson 131: “No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth.” (ACIM, W-131):

“Failure is all about you while you seek for goals that cannot be achieved.You look for permanence in the impermanent, for love where there is none, for safety in the midst of danger; immortality within the darkness of the dream of death.Who could succeed where contradiction is the setting of his searching, and the place to which he comes to find stability?

Goals that are meaningless are not attained. There is no way to reach them, for the means by which you strive for them are meaningless as they are. Who can use such senseless means, and hope through them to gain in anything? Where can they lead? And what could they achieve that offers any hope of being real? Pursuit of the imagined leads to death because it is the search for nothingness, and while you seek for life you ask for death. You look for safety and security, while in your heart you pray for danger and protection for the little dream you made.

Yet searching is inevitable here.For this you came, and you will surely do the thing you came for. But the world can not dictate the goal for which you search, unless you give it power to do so. Otherwise, you still are free to choose a goal that lies beyond the world and every worldly thought, and one that comes to you from an idea relinquished yet remembered, old yet new; an echo of a heritage forgot, yet holding everything you really want.”

(ACIM, W-131.1:1–3:4)

Truth is formless and changeless, so returning to it is (happily) inevitable when we realize that the changeable form-bound identities we made up are “radar blip wannabes” that have never registered in eternity, and everything we made up involving space, time, form, and materiality has not (and cannot) compromise our eternal, all-inclusive, indivisible, inseparable, innocent being shared by all.

Every specific thing we made up is the “mathematically perfect classroom” when given to our Inner Kindness Teacher (Holy Spirit) for correction that helps us undo our belief in duality, multiplicity, confusion, and every permutation of the silly idea of guilt.

Every specific thing we use for the Holy Spirit’s purpose is essential and successful; every specific thing we use for the ego’s purpose is non-essential and a failure to accept the sane correction of mind-wandering. This isn’t a suggestion to indulge in guilt, but just the opposite; when we notice we’ve meandered away from peace, the most loving, kind thing we can do is to make a mental bee-line back to serene sanity ASAP!

The first 3 paragraphs of Lesson 132 – “I loose the world from all I thought it was.” (ACIM, W-132) are:

Yet is salvation easily achieved, for anyone is free to change his mind, and all his thoughts change with it. Now the source of thought has shifted, for to change your mind means you have changed the source of all ideas you think or ever thought or yet will think. You free the past from what you thought before. You free the future from all ancient thoughts of seeking what you do not want to find.

The present now remains the only time. Here in the present is the world set free. For as you let the past be lifted and release the future from your ancient fears, you find escape and give it to the world. You have enslaved the world with all your fears, your doubts and miseries, your pain and tears; and all your sorrows press on it, and keep the world a prisoner to your beliefs. Death strikes it everywhere because you hold the bitter thoughts of death within your mind.”

(ACIM, W-132.1:1–3:5)

When we question ego’s false premise of unworthiness and inadequacy, we loosen our identification with the core of the thought system that must project its foundation of sin, guilt, and fear, repress the horror of it, project it onto the world, and then perceive the insanity outside of us.

“To learn this course requires willingness to question every value that you hold. Not one can be kept hidden and obscure, but it will jeopardize your learning. No belief is neutral. Every one has the power to dictate each decision you make. For a decision is a conclusion based on everything that you believe. It is the outcome of belief, and follows it as surely as does suffering follow guilt and freedom sinlessness. There is no substitute for peace. What God creates has no alternative. The truth arises from what He knows. And your decisions come from your beliefs as certainly as all creation rose in His Mind because of what He knows.” (ACIM, T-24.in.2:1-10)

The state of our body is irrelevant to our peace of mind. This wonderfully radical idea helps us loosen the tenacious ego grip on its version of “reality” – its propaganda insists bodies are our identity. The Course doesn’t ask us to deny our experience of being in a body; it merely asks us if we would be more peaceful if we questioned the ego’s interpretation of our bodies … and everything in the material universe!

“The miracle minimizes the need for time. In the longitudinal or horizontal plane the recognition of the equality of the members of the Sonship appears to involve almost endless time. However, the miracle entails a sudden shift from horizontal to vertical perception. This introduces an interval from which the giver and receiver both emerge farther along in time than they would otherwise have been. The miracle thus has the unique property of abolishing time to the extent that it renders the interval of time it spans unnecessary. There is no relationship between the time a miracle takes and the time it covers. The miracle substitutes for learning that might have taken thousands of years. It does so by the underlying recognition of perfect equality of giver and receiver on which the miracle rests. The miracle shortens time by collapsing it, thus eliminating certain intervals within it. It does this, however, within the larger temporal sequence.” (ACIM, T-1.II.6:1-10)

As Ken points out, the two ancient ideas (that we’re still participating in) are the separation (insanity) and the Atonement (the sane correction). If I think I’m separate (from anyone or anything), I’m resurrecting ancient insanity instead of using forgiveness in the present to undo this crazy belief, founded on unfounded unworthiness and a deceiving, despicable self-concept, all based on a faulty assumption of an impossible crime.

“At no single instant does the body exist at all. It is always remembered or anticipated, but never experienced just now. Only its past and future make it seem real. Time controls it entirely, for sin is never wholly in the present. In any single instant the attraction of guilt would be experienced as pain and nothing else, and would be avoided. It has no attraction now. Its whole attraction is imaginary, and therefore must be thought of in the past or in the future.” (ACIM, T-18.VII.3:1-7)

(This conversation was facilitated by Bruce Rawles as part of the School For A Course In Miracles (SFACIM) curriculum hosted by Lyn Corona and Tim Wise. This YouTube video recording was made on Tuesday, May 26, 2026.)

The post Mind Wandering (SFACIM class conversation) first appeared on ACIM blog.

Okay, so the end goal of A Course in Miracles—and I think we need to know what it is because, if we don’t know what it is, as Dayananda says, we won’t be able to find the means. The end goal is the awakening to love’s presence. The Course says that very clearly, and everything else has to be understood in the light of that goal.

If the goal is the awakening to love’s presence, then the means must be whatever removes the hindrances to that awakening. That’s exactly what the Course says. The purpose of the Course is to remove the hindrances that prevent the recognition and appreciation of love’s presence. So, the question naturally becomes, what removes those hindrances? I think the answer is very simple. It is the wisdom of Jesus coming alive in us as a new mind. That’s what we’re really dealing with.

Seeing Through the Eyes of the Body

Now, the thing is this. Can we, through the eyes of the body, see God? I don’t think we can, because ourselves as a body simply haven’t got spiritual eyes. As a body, I’ve got material eyes, and those eyes are ordered towards seeing material experiences. They allow me to see the road in front of me, other people, buildings, trees and everything else that belongs to the world of appearances. That’s what the senses are for.

But the Course makes a distinction that I think is very important. There is the world of appearances that the senses present to us, and then there is what the Course calls the world I see. The world of appearances simply arrives. We don’t make it happen. It is just there. But immediately behind those appearances comes the world I’m seeing, the meaning I’m giving to those appearances, the interpretation I’m placing upon them. That is the world I actually live in.

The World I See

When we look at the horrors that are happening in the world, it’s very easy to conclude that there is no God. But notice what’s happened. I’m no longer simply looking at appearances. I’m now looking at the world I see, a world without God. I’ve interpreted the appearances, and now I’m enclosed within that interpretation. I don’t even realise that I’m looking through my own beliefs.

The Course is saying that the world I see is a projection of beliefs and the will to be separate that exist in the mind. But we’re completely unconscious of that. As far as we’re concerned, we’re enclosed in being a body living in a world of bodies. We take our life and being to be the body itself, and because we do that, we never question the world we’re seeing. We simply assume that it is reality.

The Problem Is Not Having a Body

Now, this doesn’t mean that liberation is getting rid of the body. I don’t think that’s true at all. If liberation meant not having a body, then liberation could only occur when we’re dead, and that’s just the old-time religion. I don’t think that’s what the Course is teaching.

The problem isn’t that I have a body. The problem is that I’m identified with the body. When I’m identified with the body, I literally take myself to be my thoughts, my feelings, and my bodily experiences. That’s where the mistake occurs. The body itself isn’t the problem. My identification with it is the problem.

Becoming the Thought

Take a very ordinary example. Suppose I have the thought, “person XYZ is a so-and-so.” The moment that thought arises and I identify with it, a dualistic world immediately appears. There is now XYZ, the judged person, and there is me, the poor victim looking at XYZ. That whole world springs into existence the moment I become identified with the thought.

Notice that I don’t usually stand back and observe the thought. I simply become it. If I think XYZ is a so-and-so, I am not aware of that thought. I just have the experience that XYZ really is a so-and-so. The thought has become my reality. I’m not aware that it’s a thought occurring in the mind. I’m completely identified with it, and because I’m identified with it, I’m now living inside the world that thought has created.

The same thing happens with feelings. I don’t say, “There is loneliness present.” I say, “I am lonely.” I don’t say, “The body feels cold.” I say, “I’m cold.” Notice what has happened. I have become identified with the feeling or the bodily sensation. I am no longer aware that these are experiences. I have become the experience. That’s what I mean by being mindless.

Mindlessly Living as a Body

So here I am. I’m walking down the road, living my ordinary life, and as far as I’m concerned, I’m simply being a material body in a material world. I believe that the world I’m experiencing is being caused by what’s happening to me. It never occurs to me that the world I see is coming from me as a mind. That’s completely outside my awareness.

We’re not aware of ourselves as a mind. All we’re aware of is ourselves living mindlessly in a world that seems to be producing our experiences. The world appears to give rise to how I feel, what I think, and how I experience myself. There doesn’t seem to be a mind behind any of it.

That is why the Course is not directed to me as a body. It can’t be. As a body, I’m always frightened. I’m full of cravings. I’m constantly seeking happiness and security in the material world. That whole activity keeps me glued to the body because I’m actively being a body in the world. That activity is what I mean by being mindless.

The strange thing is that, while I’m being mindless, it doesn’t appear that I’m mindless. As a body, I cannot see that I’m mindless because, as far as I’m concerned, I’m simply being real. My experience seems completely obvious. I don’t stand back from it. I don’t question it. I simply live it.

The Memory of God’s Love

Now, luckily, something else is present within this dream of separation. Into the dream I bring with me the memory of God’s love. I think that’s a beautiful idea because it means I’m never completely cut off. Even though I’m lost in the dream of being a body, the memory of God’s love remains quietly present.

This dream of living as a body is what Aristotle would have called the necessary effect. We don’t deliberately create it. It’s simply the inevitable consequence of believing that we’re separate and apart from God, believing that we’re guilty, and believing that one day we’re going to be punished for it. Given those beliefs, living as a vulnerable body in a vulnerable world is simply the natural consequence.

So, the problem isn’t the body. The problem is that my mind, as an ignorant mind, becomes invisible when that mind that I am is projected as the experience I am facing; I’m completely identified with the body. When I’m lost in the body, I’m mindless. I don’t know that, as a mind, I carry the beliefs in sin, guilt, and fear. I don’t know that I have this deep wish to exist separately from God. None of that is available to me while I’m actively being a body.

The Movie Projector and the Movie

The beliefs in the mind- sin, guilt, and fear and the desire to be separate and apart from God in order to have my own “BE” get projected as myself as a mind-sense-body complex who is lonely, self-hating, or guilty and fearful. The mind is like the movie projector, and the movie that appears on the screen is the body and the world I experience. We are always looking at an outward picture of an inward condition.

There’s very little point in trying to change the movie while ignoring the projector. The movie simply reflects whatever is in the projector. Unless the content in the mind changes, the projection will continue to appear exactly as before. That’s why we’re destined to keep repeating the same experience while we continue believing the same things.

The reason we become so absorbed in the world is that it protects our mindlessness. We don’t want to get near the mind because the mind contains guilt, and to become aware of that guilt feels as though punishment will immediately follow. We’re frightened of arriving at ourselves as a mind. So, we place a veil between ourselves as a mind and the material universe, and then we spend our lives being enclosed within the veil instead of the problem behind it.

Why Changing the Projection Isn’t Enough

This is why I said psychotherapy doesn’t ultimately solve the problem. It tries to improve or repair the mind-sense-body complex, but the mind-sense-body complex is itself a projection. It is the projection of an ignorant and wilful mind that is determined to have its own existence separate and apart from God. As long as that fundamental wish remains unchanged, the projection may alter its form, but the underlying problem remains exactly the same.

If I want my own separate existence, I first have to believe that I really am separate from God. In effect, I have to murder God in order to establish myself (of course I can’t, but I can imagine I have). That produces an all-pervasive ontological guilt. Having left the invulnerability of God, I now experience myself as deeply vulnerable. I also expect punishment because I believe I have done something terribly wrong. That whole structure belongs to the mind, not to the body.

Appreciating Ourselves as Mind

Now, this is a difficult thing for people to grasp because we can only really know ourselves as a mind when we’re being mindful. As far as we’re concerned, we’re actively being a body, and that activity keeps our attention fixed on the world. We blame the world, we feel victimised by it, and we become convinced that our misery is being caused by something or somebody outside ourselves. All the time, we’re hiding from the fact that we’re actually doing this to ourselves.

We’re completely convinced that the experience we’re facing is causing our upset. We believe the blame belongs somewhere else. In one sense it’s a fantastic arrangement because it keeps us from ever looking where the problem really is. But there’s no hope in that arrangement because, if the cause is always outside me, there’s nothing I can do except keep trying to rearrange the world.

So, the obvious question becomes, how do we begin to appreciate ourselves as a mind? We’ve been saying that the mind is where the problem is located, but we’ve also been saying that we’re mindless. So, what can I possibly do as a body struggling in the world? The answer is that, AS a body, there’s nothing I can do. The body doesn’t do anything in the spiritual sense because it is simply the mindless projection of the mind.

The Difference Between a Body and a Listening Mind

This is where one of Dayananda’s distinctions helped me enormously. He made a very clear distinction between ourselves as a body and ourselves as a listening mind. He spoke about ourselves as a simple conscious person. That is something quite different from this mindless mind-sense-body complex that continually dramatizes sin, guilt and fear.

The body can certainly become more comfortable. For example, suppose I feel socially isolated and disapproved of. Perhaps I’m a little dyslexic, perhaps I’m a little Asperger’s, and then I learn social skills that help me gain approval. Outwardly, my life begins to come together. The form has changed, and I may feel much happier, but fundamentally nothing has changed. I’m still being a body. My identity hasn’t shifted at all.

That’s why I think it’s so important not to confuse improvement in the projection with transformation of the mind. The projection may become much more pleasant, but the underlying identification remains exactly the same. I’m still taking myself to be a body living in a material world.

The Beginning of the Spiritual Search

Then something very interesting starts to happen. A dissatisfaction begins to enter the dream. It isn’t dissatisfaction with one particular circumstance. It isn’t simply that I want a better job, a better relationship, or a better experience. It’s a dissatisfaction with the whole arrangement. There is this sense that there must be another way because this whole setup of being a body, destined for old age, sickness, and death, doesn’t really satisfy.

Something in us begins to ask, “Is this it? Is this really as good as it gets?” I think that’s a very important moment because it marks the beginning of the spiritual search. It isn’t the search for a better experience. It’s the recognition that the whole pattern of seeking happiness as a body isn’t working.

I think that impulse is actually a reflection, within the material dream, of the memory of God’s Love. It appears as the thought, “There must be a better way than this.” That thought doesn’t come from the body’s cravings. It reflects the memory of God’s love continually calling us home. It’s the operation of wisdom beginning to work in our lives, even before we understand what is happening.

Why We Are Drawn to a Spiritual Teaching

This is why we suddenly find ourselves attracted to a spiritual teaching. We discover A Course in Miracles, or perhaps we travel to India, or we become interested in something that speaks to us in a completely different way. I don’t think that’s an accident. It is simply another expression of the desire to go home.

Something in the teaching attracts us because the Course is speaking to us as a mind that still carries the memory of God’s love. It isn’t addressing us as a body trying to become successful in the world. If all I’m interested in is preserving myself as a body, the Course has very little appeal because it isn’t helping me become a more successful body. The Course, on the other hand, is calling me to wake up from the dream of being a body.

As soon as I’m born as a body, old age, sickness, and death are already part of the arrangement. It doesn’t matter how successful I become; that outcome remains. So, myself as a body isn’t naturally interested in waking up. Myself as a body is interested in becoming a successful body. But something deeper than the body is drawn to the Course, and I think that is the memory of God’s love quietly calling us home.

Listening with an Open Mind

So here I am. I come across A Course in Miracles. Outwardly, it looks as though I’m simply picking up a book. But something much deeper is happening. What is drawing me to the book is the memory of God’s love. Something in me recognises something in it. I find it attractive because it is speaking to the part of me that wants to go home. It isn’t speaking to me as a body trying to improve itself. It’s speaking to me as a mind that still carries the memory of God’s love.

The Course does not address us as a body. It can’t. The Course is addressing us as a mind with the memory of God’s love. If I’m completely dominated by the cravings of the body and my whole interest is self-preservation, then why would I be interested in waking up from the dream? I wouldn’t. I’d be interested in becoming a more successful body. It is only because something deeper is active in me that I find myself attracted to a teaching like this.

So I begin to read. I begin to listen. I begin exposing my mind to another way of understanding. That is where another of Dayananda’s insights becomes very important. He used to say that the Lord has given us the capacity to suspend judgment. He said that faith is the suspension of judgment pending discovery. I’ve always thought that was a beautiful description of faith because it doesn’t ask me to believe blindly. It simply asks me to remain open long enough to discover whether something is true.

Becoming a Listening Mind

As I begin listening in this way, something changes. When I take Jesus’ hand and simply say, “Please help me understand,” I’m no longer operating as a body trying to solve its own problems. I’m now being an open mind. I’m listening. I’m pondering. I’m examining. That is a completely different state from being mindlessly identified with the body.

Notice that I haven’t become enlightened. I haven’t solved the problem. But I am no longer being the same kind of mind. Before, I was a mind completely identified with the mind-sense-body complex. Now I’m becoming a listening mind. I’m becoming available to wisdom. I think that is the first real movement towards awakening because I’m no longer completely enclosed within my own interpretations.

Awakening to Love’s Presence

Now I want to come back to the main subject because this is what I really wanted to talk about today. The goal of the Course is awakening to Love’s Presence by removing the hindrances to it. That awakening doesn’t happen only at the end of the forgiveness process. It can begin while I’m reading the Course itself. It can begin while I’m quietly listening. I can suddenly come alive to the fact that, right here, right now, there is only the Presence of God.

Once that understanding begins to dawn, something very important has happened. That wisdom is now governing me. Instead of my own ignorance determining how I see everything, the wisdom of Jesus begins determining how I see. When the understanding arises that, right here, right now, as I am, there is only the presence of God, am I likely to continue chasing some future experience called enlightenment? I don’t think I am.

Understanding Must Come Before Abiding

In order to abide in the appreciation of Love’s Presence, certain understandings have to arise. There is a certain wisdom that has to become alive in me. I have to become a mind governed by that wisdom instead of a mind governed by ignorance. The very first understanding is this: Any action I take as a body simply produces a bodily result. This is a law.

If I, as a body, start thinking and doing what I believe are spiritual actions, then I am still believing that I, as a body, can become enlightened. Do you see the problem? The body can never awaken to God because the body belongs to the dream. That’s why it is so important to distinguish between ourselves AS a body and ourselves AS a simple conscious mind. Until that distinction becomes clear, we’ll continue expecting the body to accomplish something it can never accomplish.

Even as we begin to understand this, notice what happens. The moment you genuinely see that yourself as a body can do absolutely nothing to awaken itself, something in you pauses. There is a quiet stopping. That isn’t resignation. It is the wisdom of Jesus beginning to open your eyes. You’re beginning to see your situation through spiritual understanding instead of through the body’s blinding interpretations.

Awakening Begins with Understanding

The interesting thing is that, when you really see that yourself as a body can do absolutely nothing to solve the problem of human life, there is a pause. You stop. You’re no longer striving in the same way because the wisdom of Jesus is allowing you to see your situation with spiritual eyes. You’re beginning to understand that the body cannot solve the problem of being a body. The body can only seek satisfying experiences and avoid unsatisfying ones. That is all it can ever do.

When I begin to see that, I also begin to see that my whole life, as a body, has been a mindless charade. It has been the projection of an error that exists in the mind. That doesn’t mean I condemn myself. It simply means I begin to understand where the real problem is located. The problem isn’t in the projection. The problem is in the content of the mind that gives rise to the projection.

So here I am, wanting to awaken to the presence of God’s Love because that is the goal of the Course. If that is the goal, then I have to turn towards it. I have to cease being active as this mind-sense-body complex. I have to stop believing that my activity as a body is going to bring about awakening. That is the movement the Course is inviting us to make.

The Presence of God Is Already Here

Now, if I cease being active as a mind-sense-body complex, do I create the presence of God? No. The presence of God is already here. It simply becomes evident. That is a very important distinction because we spend so much of our lives trying to produce spiritual experiences. We imagine that somehow we have to make God become Present. But God doesn’t become Present. God is already Present.

Can I produce the presence of God? No. But I can certainly be blind to it. That’s what being a body is. Being a body is blindness to the presence of God. As long as I’m actively identified as a body, I cannot appreciate what has always been here because my attention is completely absorbed in maintaining the dream.

The Course tells us that the presence of God is available for recognition and appreciation right here, right now, exactly as we are. When I’m at home in God, I’m simply being myself. I’m reflecting the truth of Christ, which is perfect oneness with God. So, the solution isn’t somewhere else. The location of the solution is right here, in what I am being at this very moment.

We’re also told that the fullness of God that we’re seeking is already here. Our identity as the Son of God is perfectly intact. Those aren’t ideas that we’re supposed to admire from a distance. They are the wisdom that gradually begins to govern our lives. As that wisdom becomes alive in us, we begin to look at ourselves very differently.

Doing Nothing to Fix Myself as a Body

Now suppose I suddenly find myself upset and angry. The question is, what do I do? My whole life I’ve immediately tried to fix myself. I’ve tried to improve myself. I’ve tried to become a better version of myself. But the Course says something very different. If I make any move to fix myself up as an angry body, I’m making that angry self real. That’s one of the principles of the Course.

So now I’m being governed by the wisdom of Jesus instead of my own habits. The wisdom says something very simple. If I remain active as a body trying to fix myself, I’ll simply keep the dream alive. I’ll keep myself blind to God because my whole attention is still centred on preserving myself as a body. The wisdom gently says, “Don’t do that.”

I ask you now to simply ponder this for a moment. Right here, in this very situation, there is absolutely nothing I can do to make God become evident to me. Just notice what happens when you really consider that. Any attempt to adjust my present state is simply more activity of myself as a body, and that activity keeps me blind to the Love that is already Present.

Do this for a couple of minutes.

Did you notice a relaxation become evident? No trying to relax but simply BEING relaxed. This is very significant because, to some degree, you have ceased being a body. You no longer felt the need to do something about yourself. Why? Because the wisdom was governing you. That is what it means to be governed by the wisdom of Jesus. His way of seeing quietly becomes our way of seeing. We SEE that we can do nothing so we find ourselves doing nothing.

Remaining with the Experience

You may have noticed that you were simply being drawn into the Presence of Being. You weren’t being a thinker or a struggler anymore. This is a very important observation because that’s exactly what begins to happen. You’re no longer trying to solve yourself. You’re no longer trying to become something else. You’re simply Being.

Now I want to bring it back to a very practical situation. Suppose here I am in a really miserable state. Suppose I’m feeling a deep loneliness. Normally, my whole life has been organised around getting away from that loneliness. I immediately start looking for some way of escaping it, distracting myself from it, analysing it or fixing it. That’s been my normal pattern for most of my life.

But now the wisdom of Jesus begins to govern me. That wisdom tells me something completely different. It tells me that the loneliness isn’t the real problem. The loneliness is an experience. It belongs to the projection. The real problem is that, as a mind, I believe I am separate and apart from God. That belief is what is producing the experience. The experience itself isn’t the problem.

Notice what is happening. I’m now looking at my situation through Jesus’ eyes. Without the Course, I wouldn’t even know to do this. I would simply remain convinced that the experience itself was my problem. But now the wisdom of Jesus is showing me that the experience is pointing to something much deeper. It is pointing to the belief that I have a separate existence from God.

Remaining Quietly with Myself

Once I understand that, I have no choice but to remain quietly with my misery. There is a principle of Dayananda’s that helped me enormously. He used to say that you can only know wholeness when you’re being whole. If I immediately run away from my misery, I’m not remaining whole. I’m splitting myself. I’m creating one part that is trying to escape another part.

So I remain with myself exactly as I am. I remain with the misery. I don’t move away from it because I understand that every movement away makes the projection seem more real. I may be able to distract myself. I might watch a good television programme and forget my loneliness for a while. I might think I’ve found the answer. But all I’ve really done is keep the misery at bay. I’ve avoided seeing what is actually going on.

Now I can simply see that I’m feeling miserable, and I remain with that fact. The Wisdom of Jesus tells me that I’m not suffering from anything real. I’m suffering from the idea that I’m separate and apart from God. The experience isn’t my real problem. The thought is the problem. The will to have my own existence apart from God is the problem. That’s where my attention begins to turn.

“Please Help Me See”

So now something very simple happens. I turn to the Living Presence that IS Jesus, and I say, “Please help me see. Please give me the eyes to see the presence of God because I can’t.” Notice what has happened. I’m not trying to produce an experience. I’m not trying to force myself into peace. I’m simply asking for another way of seeing. I am now wanting to receive the Wisdom, and because of that wanting I am opening my mind to receive it.

The interesting thing is that I’m now doing nothing. I’m not trying not to do something. I’m literally doing nothing because the understanding itself has brought me to stillness. I’m no longer being a body trying to fix a body. I’m being a mind quietly present with the experience, without friction, without fighting it, without analysing it, and without trying to change it.

The spiritual understanding tells me that the fullness of God is present right here, right now, precisely where I am. It also tells me that the only reason I’m blind to that presence is that I’m busy being a body. I’m identified with the projection because, as a mind, I still believe that I’m separate and apart from God. That understanding quietly changes everything because it tells me where to look and, just as importantly, where not to look.

Letting God Take Up All the Room

So here I am. I simply remain. I’m living from this understanding that right here, where the problem is “There Is Only God”. I see that this is my only salvation. If I remain exactly where I am and cease being a body that is struggling, striving, hoping, and wishing, then my real nature will become evident. I don’t make it happen. It simply becomes apparent, just as a cork held under water rises naturally to the surface once it is released.

At that point, I simply let God take up all the room. I do absolutely nothing. I’m not trying to become spiritual. I’m not trying to manufacture the presence of God. I’m simply allowing myself to receive the Presence that is already here. In fact, it feels less like I’m going to God and more like God is drawing me in. Because we carry the memory of God’s love within us, there is something in us that naturally responds to that drawing.

The Purpose of the Metaphysics

Now, this brings us back to the purpose of the metaphysics in A Course in Miracles. The metaphysics isn’t there so that I can make grand statements like, “I’m a perfect child of God,” and then simply repeat them to myself. I can say those words until kingdom come. I can express them as metaphysical ideas, but by themselves they have no value to me. What has value is that when I’m resting in God, I am appreciating this spiritual fact in its reflected form.

When I’m appreciating myself as being at home with myself because I’m at home in God, that’s an entirely different thing. I’m no longer talking to myself using metaphysics. What’s happened is that I’ve awakened to Love’s Presence. I can now rest in that Love, and when I’m resting in that Love, right here, right now, as I am, that’s what gives me release. It isn’t the metaphysics itself that gives me release. It is awakening to the Presence of God.

The metaphysics helps because it tells me that God is all-pervasive. Despite appearances, the presence of God is always here. It is always available for recognition and appreciation. That understanding becomes enormously important because it tells me that the solution is never somewhere else. The solution is always the appreciation of the Presence of God that is already here.

The Presence of God Is the Transformative Factor

In fact, I think the only thing that transforms us as individuals is the Presence of God appreciated. That is the transformative factor. The whole teaching of Jesus through the Course is to open our eyes to the Presence of God by removing the hindrances. Once the Presence of God becomes something we can actually appreciate and rest in, a tremendous change takes place because we now have somewhere to go. We can take refuge in God from then on if we find ourselves troubled.

Once we understand that this is what is truly Good, this is what is truly valuable, then we begin to understand all the different forms of suffering in a completely different way. If I find myself suffering, I no longer think, “I’m suffering because of this circumstance,” or, “I’m suffering because of that person.” I understand that I’m suffering from one thing only. I’ve fallen away from resting in God. I’ve lost sight of His presence. That is my only problem.

Do you see what that does? Suddenly every form of suffering has the same underlying meaning. It isn’t the experience I’m having. It isn’t the story I’m telling myself about the experience. The problem is always that I’ve fallen away from resting in God. I’ve become separate from the awareness of the Love that is always present. That’s what suffering now means to me.

Resting in God Becomes the Benchmark

Once I know what it means to rest in God, I now have a benchmark. I know what peace actually is. I know what it feels like to be at home with myself because I’m at home in God. That changes everything because now I can immediately recognise when I’ve moved away from that Peace.

When I’m resting in God, I’m not opposing anything. There’s no friction. I’m not fighting life. I’m at home with myself because to be at home in God is to be at home with myself. That’s why I keep saying that this resolves all my problems. It resolves them because it changes the place FROM which I’m living. Now a new life is available to me.

I’m no longer trying to solve one problem after another. I’m simply returning to the one place where there are no problems. Once I know that place through my own experience, it becomes the reference point for my whole life. Whenever I lose my peace, I know exactly what has happened. I’ve stopped resting in God, and I know exactly where I need to return.

The Journey Comes Back to One Thing

So, the whole journey keeps coming back to one thing. The purpose of the Course is to awaken us to Love’s presence. The Wisdom of Jesus opens our eyes to that Presence, and once we begin appreciating it, our whole understanding of ourselves changes. We stop looking to the world for refuge because we’ve discovered a refuge that cannot be disturbed by the world.

That doesn’t mean the world disappears. It doesn’t mean experiences stop happening. It means that I now have somewhere to rest that isn’t dependent upon the world. I can take refuge in God. When I’m resting there, I’m released from my grievances about the past, my fears about the future, and my self-hatred in the present. That is what the Course is leading us towards, and I think that is what awakening to Love’s Presence really means.

Living from the Presence of God

Once I have that benchmark, I can begin to understand my life in a completely different way. Instead of continually trying to fix one problem after another, I simply ask myself one question: “Am I resting in God?” If the answer is yes, then I’m at home with myself. If the answer is no, then I know where the problem lies. It isn’t in the circumstances. It isn’t in other people. It isn’t in my body. I’ve simply fallen away from the awareness of God’s Presence.

This changes the whole way I use the metaphysics. The metaphysics is no longer something I believe for its own sake. I use it to understand what is happening with me right here, right now, as I am. It helps me penetrate beyond the experience that I think is my problem so that I can see where the problem really is. Once I see where the problem really is, then it can be resolved, and I can return to resting in God.

When I’m resting in God, it’s like heaven on earth. As an individual, I’m released from my grievances about the past, my fears about the future, and my self-hatred in the present. Those things simply aren’t governing me anymore because something else has become the governing principle of my life. The presence of God has become more real to me than the stories I normally tell myself.

This is all true, but it must be remembered that I can fall away, and will fall away from this resting place again and again. Doesn’t matter because I know I will be called back when the living Wisdom that is Jesus opens up in me and taps me on the shoulder and reminds me where my true home is.

Seeing Through Different Eyes

Normally, I create a world that is meaningful to me through the meanings I project onto it. I look at people and decide they’re against me. I decide the world is unfair. I decide that I’m only a physical body. All of those meanings become the world that I live in. The world I see is really the meanings that I have projected onto the world of appearances.

If I want that world to change, I don’t actually have to change the world. I have to begin seeing through a different set of eyes. When I’m seeing only through my own eyes, I’m enclosed in separation. I’m caught up in my own interpretations. But when I begin seeing through the eyes of Jesus, the whole world takes on a different meaning because it is now being interpreted through Wisdom and Love instead of fear.

That’s why I don’t think it’s helpful to tell someone who is suffering that the world isn’t real anyway. That doesn’t resolve suffering. The proper use of metaphysics is to help me understand what my suffering really is. I usually think that my suffering is the painful experience I’m having. The Course is teaching me that my suffering comes from the beliefs that I’m separate and apart from God, that I’m somehow evil at the core and destined for punishment. Those are beliefs, and those beliefs produce the experience.

The Experience Is Not the Problem

Once I begin to understand that, my attention starts to shift. Instead of remaining absorbed in the experience, I begin looking at the beliefs that are producing the experience. The experience itself is no longer the problem. It’s pointing me towards the real problem, which is the way I’m thinking. The metaphysics helps me make that shift because it enables me to see beyond appearances into what is actually happening in my own mind.

Then I can resolve the real problem instead of continually trying to manage the symptoms. As I do that, I naturally return to resting in God. When I’m resting in God, I know what it means to be at home with myself. I know what it means to be free from grievances, free from fear, and free from self-hatred. That becomes a living experience rather than simply another idea in the Course.

I think that’s the whole direction of the teaching. The metaphysics isn’t an end in itself. It serves one purpose only. It opens my eyes to the ever-present love of God so that I can stop living from separation and begin living from the Peace that has always been here.

Summary

Right here, right now, I find myself disturbed. I now go through a process of removing the hindrances to Love’s Presence. The hindrance called blaming, the hindrance of self-hatred or guilt. The hindrance of thinking that I am a body, and so on and so on. When these hindrances are removed right now, right here, through the Wisdom of Jesus coming alive in me as a new mind, we awaken to the Presence of God. Now we have found our refuge, our true home, and our practice becomes returning to this refuge any time we see that we have lost sight of the Peace and Love of God.

The post The Goal of a Course in Miracles – Bede Draper first appeared on ACIM blog.

The word “joke” is only mentioned once in ACIM, but in a well-known paragraph:

“Let us return the dream he gave away unto the dreamer, who perceives the dream as separate from himself and done to him. Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects. Together, we can laugh them both away, and understand that time cannot intrude upon eternity. It is a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity, which means there is no time.”

It should be obvious that the levity or humor in the Course is completely devoid of any harm, cruelty, or mean-spirited motivation, since those are really just variations of ego’s morbid, sinister, and wicked tyranny. When we laugh with the Holy Spirit or the Jesus of the Course, we gently, patiently, kindly laugh at the silliness of taking the ego seriously. There are 24 instances of “laugh” or variations of that word in ACIM.

Levity’s lightness lifts us (metaphorically) up vertically above the battleground of the ego’s heavy, uncertain, lonely, fearful, desperate, dreary, dark, and deadly gravity. The Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland makes light of the insanity of dueling dualistic thinking by reminding all of us fantasy figures that we’re all mad here! Fortunately, we have our Inner Kindness Teacher to awaken us from the dream of separation through consistently relinquishing the gravity of condemning judgments.

Again, we discussed the movie Inception, featured in prior nerdy ACIMblog posts here and here, as well as Interstellar, both directed by Christopher Nolan. We also shared enthusiasm for the movies Arrival and Contact.

Here are some humorous ACIM quotes (oh-so-gently lampooning everyone’s ego) from a presentation I gave in June 2016 in Estes Park, Colorado at the Weekend of Freedom Retreat:

“There’s a little man; very sweet, very gentle, and he keeps tapping us and saying: ‘Come listen to me. This is not what you think. Let me tell you a very funny story.’ We don’t want to hear a funny story. … He says ‘Ya gotta hear this; it’s really cute; it’s sweet, it’s funny, it will make you laugh.’ (We respond:) ‘I’m not letting go of my anger, my grievance, my pain, my suffering, my memories or my specialness.’ He waits and waits and waits. He’s always smiling sweetly, gently, tenderly, kindly. That’s what forgiveness means. You don’t take things personally. You don’t let things upset you. How could a world of total unreality upset you? Unless you had an investment in the world of total unreality being reality.”
– Kenneth Wapnick, “Taking the Ego Lightly: Protecting Our Projections”

“The acceptance of the Atonement by everyone is only a matter of time. ²This may appear to contradict free will because of the inevitability of the final decision, but this is not so. ³You can temporize, and you are capable of enormous procrastination, but you cannot depart entirely from your Creator, Who set the limits on your ability to miscreate. ⁴An imprisoned will engenders a situation which, in the extreme, becomes altogether intolerable. ⁵Tolerance for pain may be high, but it is not without limit. ⁶Eventually everyone begins to recognize, however dimly, that there must be a better way.” (ACIM, T-2.III.3:1-6)

Here is a related post featuring a calendar with Humorous quotes lampooning the ego, and a prior post with a video from the “Weekend of Freedom Retreat” conference presentation noted above.

I also stumbled on the “sin, guilt, and fear” phrase that Ken Wapnick described as the “unholy trinity” of how ego uses time, or rather abuses the past, present, and future to mindlessly reinforce our dream of separation. I recently made a little rebus for this:

We also touched on the importance of admitting that we’re clueless, and becoming happily clueless. This relates beautifully to the four stages of competence detailed in this blog post and how it relates to the “undo curriculum” of the Course:
From ego incompetence and insanity to Holy Spirit’s sanity: habits and the four stages

Here is some fascinating commentary on how photons don’t experience time (along with a few related ACIM quotes) that Stefan provided and read:

“A photon born in the first seconds after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, experienced zero time between the moment it was created and the moment it was absorbed. For that photon, birth and death were the same instant.

This is not a metaphor. It is a direct consequence of special relativity. As an object accelerates toward the speed of light, time for that object dilates and slows relative to everything else. At the speed of light itself, that dilation becomes infinite. No time passes between emission and absorption, regardless of the distance traveled or the billions of years that passed for the universe around it.

From your frame of reference, a photon leaving a star 8 minutes away takes 8 minutes to arrive. From the photon‘s frame of reference, it left and arrived simultaneously. It experienced no journey. It crossed no distance. The 8 minutes existed entirely in the universe it passed through, not in anything the photon itself experienced.

Scale that up. A photon from a galaxy 13 billion light years away has been traveling since the early universe by our clock. By its own clock, it never traveled at all. The entire history of the cosmos, every star that formed and died, every galaxy that assembled and collided, every civilization that may have risen and fallen, all of that happened in the gap between a photon‘s birth and death that the photon itself never experienced.

Time is not built into the universe at its most fundamental speed. It is something that emerges only for objects slow enough to be trapped by it.

Every moment you have ever lived, every memory, every second that felt urgent or precious, exists only because you are moving far slower than light. You experience time because you cannot escape it. The photon never could be trapped by it in the first place.

The universe is 13.8 billion years old. For light itself, it has always been no age at all.”

Here are prior related conversations with Stefan Bolz and Bruce Rawles:

• A Course in Miracles: ego foolery and Holy Spirit humor with Stefan Bolz and Bruce Rawles
• ACIM: Stop thrashing in ego’s quicksand – Stefan Bolz and Bruce Rawles conversation

This video was recorded on June 29, 2026.

Stefan’s excellent YouTube channel – A Course In Miracles – Applied – has over 200 insightful, clear presentations of important Course topics. He is also the author of several books and many other contributions to collaborative works on Amazon. More info is on his blog, Stefan’s Writing Desk: Stories of Hope and Splendor, and his Facebook page, Stefan Bolz, Author.

The post A Course in Miracles: Stefan Bolz and Bruce Rawles on Traveling Light: from gravity to levity first appeared on ACIM blog.

We began the class by reading Workbook Lesson 125: In quiet I receive God’s Word today; here are the first three paragraphs:

2. This world will change through you. ²No other means can save it, for God’s plan is simply this: The Son of God is free to save himself, given the Word of God to be his Guide, forever in his mind and at his side to lead him surely to his Father’s house by his own will, forever free as God’s. ³He is not led by force, but only love. ⁴He is not judged, but only sanctified.

3. In stillness we will hear God’s Voice today without intrusion of our petty thoughts, without our personal desires, and without all judgment of His holy Word. ²We will not judge ourselves today, for what we are can not be judged. ³We stand apart from all the judgments which the world has laid upon the Son of God. ⁴It knows him not. ⁵Today we will not listen to the world, but wait in silence for the Word of God.

(ACIM, W-125.1:1–3:5)

The quiet center is a related metaphor in the Course, reminding us that peace is always possible. We return the interpretation faculty in our mind to the center (the Holy Spirit), denying all of our peripheral projections the status of cause in our mind, but are restored to their rightful place as mere effects of our choice of teachers. When we choose the Holy Spirit (our Inner Peace Teacher) as our source of guidance and perspective, our peace is not subject to our prior dualistic dreams because we have changed the cause from (dualistic) war to (non-dual) tranquility.

We read and shared thoughts about the section in ACIM’s text entitled The Irreconcilable Beliefs (ACIM, T-23.I)

Here are the first three paragraphs of this section:

“The memory of God comes to the quiet mind. ²It cannot come where there is conflict, for a mind at war against itself remembers not eternal gentleness. ³The means of war are not the means of peace, and what the warlike would remember is not love. ⁴War is impossible unless belief in victory is cherished. ⁵Conflict within you must imply that you believe the ego has the power to be victorious. ⁶Why else would you identify with it? ⁷Surely you realize the ego is at war with God. ⁸Certain it is it has no enemy. ⁹Yet just as certain is its fixed belief it has an enemy that it must overcome and will succeed.

2. Do you not realize a war against yourself would be a war on God? ²Is victory conceivable? ³And if it were, is this a victory that you would want? ⁴The death of God, if it were possible, would be your death. ⁵Is this a victory? ⁶The ego always marches to defeat, because it thinks that triumph over you is possible. ⁷And God thinks otherwise. ⁸This is no war; only the mad belief the Will of God can be attacked and overthrown. ⁹You may identify with this belief, but never will it be more than madness. ¹⁰And fear will reign in madness, and will seem to have replaced love there. ¹¹This is the conflict’s purpose. ¹²And to those who think that it is possible, the means seem real.

3. Be certain that it is impossible God and the ego, or yourself and it, will ever meet. ²You seem to meet, and make your strange alliances on grounds that have no meaning. ³For your beliefs converge upon the body, the ego’s chosen home, which you believe is yours. ⁴You meet at a mistake; an error in your self-appraisal. ⁵The ego joins with an illusion of yourself you share with it. ⁶And yet illusions cannot join. ⁷They are the same, and they are nothing. ⁸Their joining lies in nothingness; two are as meaningless as one or as a thousand. ⁹The ego joins with nothing, being nothing. ¹⁰The victory it seeks is meaningless as is itself.”

(ACIM, T-23.I.1:1–3:10)

Our egos make such “big deals” about our specific issues, grievances, worries, and tragedies. Yet from the eternal perspective of the Holy Spirit, these incitements to outrage are all “much ado about nothing.” Like the Cheshire Cat (in Alice in Wonderland), looking down on the chessboard of an insane battle, without condemning, because it is a silly, forgivable dream, a meaningless ego game, we can afford to gently dismiss the ego’s propaganda to take the tiny mad idea of duality seriously.

“Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.” (ACIM, T-in.2:2-4)

(This conversation was facilitated by Bruce Rawles as part of the School For A Course In Miracles (SFACIM) curriculum hosted by Lyn Corona and Tim Wise. This YouTube video recording was made on Tuesday, May 5, 2026.)

The post Transcending the need to fight (SFACIM class conversation) first appeared on ACIM blog.