1. You chose; no one else did it to you or for you. Neither God, nor your worst enemy, nor your best friend, nor your parents, nor teachers and priests.
2. There is a reason for you to be here. It is so that you can see the difference between the peace and love of your Spirit and the fear of your ego. The choice is always between two voices; two teachers. Every minute of every hour of every day you listen to either the voice of your ego or the Voice of your Spirit.
3. We are all in different schools and in different classrooms for the lessons we have appointed for ourselves to learn. We are always exactly where we need to be for what we need to learn. Therefore, do no criticise your brother for his chosen path and do not blame others for yours. We can not judge anything, for we do not know the reason for it to be. It is totally inappropriate to rush in, "sympathize" with your brother and attempt to take him away from his lesson. But it IS appropriate to offer him your love when he asks for it. Asking is not always verbal, but will be obvious to your "love mind." Kindness, consideration and help are all extensions of the love that you are.
4. Your brother is your mirror. When you see something about him you do not like, know it is your own projection of a fault in you that you are seeing in him. Whenever you notice the discomfort, always look deeply within yourself as you say, "What is there about my brother that bothers me, and where is that same thing in me?" Remember, if it bothers you, it is in you. You might see a brother doing a foolish thing and not have it bother you. So then you know you are okay at least with that. You can smile, bless him and send him your love, thanking him for offering you the lesson and of being your saviour. Spirit has placed everyone in your life for a reason. Your only mistake would be not to recognize the lesson. Stay awake and be aware.
5. Lessons are on-going. After you have learned one, another will appear. When you have learned them all, you will realize your own perfection and completeness. You will understand your own Atonement, when you realize what and where you are always, and have always been.
6. As we begin to learn about our Love, we can offer it to others and show by our example what we have remembered, and that they can do it also, when they are ready. We join our infinite hearts with theirs, one by one, as we all walk home together.
We also say, "God extended Himself and created His One Son." That too implies a time in the past, a situation which is not correct. God is continuous. His Creation goes on all the time and always has. So He "extends" Himself continuously, giving all His Power and Thought to His Extension, which, in the narrow sense, is us.
So there you have it. All of Everything That Is consists of God, His Extension and Heaven, going on creating eternally, infinitely and totally, outside of time and space. This is the Condition called Heaven and exists within the "Mind of God." If God thinks It, It is. ACIM© tells us we are some of God's Thoughts, which in total are numbers infinite. All this is completely beyond the understanding of our ego mind. Our spirit mind does not need to understand it, and simply accepts it in perfect faith, knowing it to be true. To have to "prove" God is to remain in ego thinking which has no resolution possible. So we have a choice. We either accept God, or wander around in our ego, looking for an explanation of Heaven from our perception within our world.
That Condition of God - His Extension, Christ, and Heaven is all there is. Outside of that is nothing wandering in a world of nothing. So under that Condition, we draw a line and say, "That is All that Is, that is Everything," and rest in the reflection of that knowledge.
God is not a man in spite of all our attempts to make Him one, with all our attributes and thoughts. We have tried to give Him our feelings, emotions, desires and even failings, all to no avail. God is simply THE Idea of Perfect Oneness. His Name is Oneness, and His Word is Oneness. Outside the ONE there is nothing.
God is our Father, and we are his Child. In our creation, God endowed us with all His Power, Capability and Desire. But as a little Child we also had the curiosity to explore our Self and our new-found Power. While most of Us were quite content to go on creating in Heaven, a very small percentage of us wondered what it would be like to be better than perfect and have more than everything. We then "remembered not to laugh" at this quite insane thought, and took it seriously, which made it possible of accomplishment and began the process of our dream of our galaxies, our world and our bodies.
It must be remembered that this never happened, of course, remaining as a curious thought, a mistaken dream. But here we are, experiencing our thought in all its forms in what we call "life." Actually it is DEATH because it signifies a suspension of our true LIFE as part of God's Son, The Christ, in Heaven. As we go 'round and 'round our many incarnations within our dream, we experience what we now call "life" and "death." These are all simply phases of our dream choice within our illusion.
But God realizes we are having a small problem employing all the Power He gave us, and so has sent His Correction, Holy Spirit, to bring us back to sane thought. Holy Spirit has appointed Jesus as his manifestation within our world of form and bodies. Jesus has written a book about what we did, are doing and how we can correct it. That book is called "A Course In Miracles©" and is a complete course of instruction in how we can recognize and correct our mistaken thought and get back to our Self. There are, and always have been other paths back to Sanity, but ACIM© says of itself that it is the most direct, and will save us hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of trial, error and misery if we decide to learn it and follow its instruction. It is a book for our time and for our present situation. It is beyond what served others well in the past and will lead us directly Home.
In summary, ACIM© tells us our way home is through FORGIVENESS. This means forgiving ourself for what we thought was so, and ASKING our Guide, Holy Spirit, to show us our way. He will suit His instruction to our situation and our capability of understanding until that understanding becomes one with God's.
We must understand that we were the one who chose to be here. When we made that choice, we understood we had lessons to learn, what they were, and where we could best learn them. So we chose to be in that situation. Then once arriving here, we forgot we had made the choice or what it was we had appointed for ourself to learn. So here we are, apparently lost and wandering around in circles wondering what in hell we are doing. But there is One that remembers for us and He is our Holy Spirit. Does it not then seem logical to ASK the One Who knows? Our one prayer then should be only to Holy Spirit (or Jesus, or God, or Great Spirit) to guide us to remember what and where we truly are forever, which ACIM© calls our Atonement. It says the miracle worker's one responsibility is to accept Atonement for himself! Not to make the world a better place, not to cure what we see as ills, not to force our brothers to be wise and/or as "spiritual" as we. They are all on their self-chosen lessons too, which they must go through and learn, even if we can't understand their process, or want to help remove their "pain."
Everything that happens around us is either love being sent or a call for love being asked. In either case, our only reply is to send our love, in whatever form is appropriate in any given situation. The fine line distinction is to determine when it is being asked for and when we are simply trying to administer out of our own need. Since we often can not make that distinction, it is necessary in every case to ASK our Holy Spirit for his guidance in our decision. He can not and will not decide for us, but He will guide us to decide correctly if we listen really carefully and do not argue or miss the guidance.
Whether we have listened to Holy Spirit or ego, will be determined in a short while by the results of our thought on the matter. In the more immediate, we will feel peaceful about it, and remain at peace. When we have been able to forgive ourself continuously about everything, we will remain in a permanently peaceful place called "a state of grace." We will then know that everything is absolutely O.K. just as it is as we walk home together with our brother.
As we forgive, we will see only the Christ in all our brothers and in ourself, and thus remember God, our Self and Heaven. Remembering it is still not being there, so we go to the real world of the Holy Spirit to wait upon the "lawns of heaven" for God's last step in lifting us home. If He did not know we were absent from His Heart, He would not know He had to lift us Home. God wants the flow of His Love through us returned to Him. He knows something has interrupted the continuous flow back to Him and has "sent" Holy Spirit to us to correct the situation and restore the flow.
In our creation, God gave us all His infinite Peace, Love, Joy and Eternal Life of His Oneness. He never took it away. We still have it fully. The only thing that keeps us from recognizing it, are all the many blocks to the "awareness of love's presence" that we have erected. Therefore, it is necessary for us to look at these blocks, one-by-one with the help of our Guidance, recognize them and let them go back to the nothingness from which we made them. Every last bit of darkness must be uncovered. We can not keep any one tiny bit as too valuable, too horrible or too personal. We made them, and only we can release them. But we can't do it alone. We have to ASK our Guidance to show us the way and then DO IT. One at a time. One after the other. Our burden becomes lighter and our light becomes brighter. It is a process. It is not done all at once, and it is not done for us. As with any journey, the first step is always hardest as we make the commitment to begin and have the willingness to be shown. ACIM© says, "Of yourself you can do nothing, but with your Self you can do everything."
Since nothing was ever lost, there is nothing to find.
We already have it. Since nothing ever got sick, there is nothing
to heal. We are already perfect. Since we never left
Heaven, we are already there. All we have to do is remember.
That is the end of our "journey," our "peace" and our "joy."
So it is a matter of awakening from our dream and realizing what
and where we are, and have been always. And so the journey closes
before it began, we are Home before we left, and we are perfect before
we thought we were less than God created us.
As all minds are one (God created but One Son), when any one mind perfectly realized his atonement and returned, all "other" minds did it simultaneously. That is why Jesus says, "When I resurrected, you were with me." And so it is; and so it has been done. We are simply here watching and re-watching the replay over and over because we became so heavily invested in it that we don't want to give it up. Like the man who was imprisoned in the Bastile for most of his life, who when the gates were finally opened and his saviours said, "You're free! You're free," stumbled out into the sunlight, blinked at the brightness, hesitated, and stumbled back into his cell, we, too, have gotten so used to our dream, we can not now leave it or see any "Life" outside of it.
But we are free! We are redeemed! We are saved! All
it requires now is for us to wake up to that fact and be back Home, where
God would have us be!
The total sum of all our life experiences can be viewed as a hologram of intense light contained within a cylinder pierced with an infinite number of pin holes. The light beams laser outward from the intense brilliance within. Each beam can be viewed as a DATE and an experience. WE are that brilliant light. As we select a personal experience, we choose the beam we will investigate this time and proceed outward along it.
Having concluded that particular date adventure, we withdraw back along the date laser beam to our original light of oneness within. We then decide if we have had enough, or pick another date for more lessons we need to learn.
It is not necessary to experience dates in a sequential order.
One time we may choose 1997, another 1605, 675 or 2500 B.C. We don't
have to work our way through all the dates to a final conclusion.
There is no graduation. We may choose to go this way only once or
a million times as we see the necessity to prove our SELF, and where we
really dwell, as we have since before time was.
"Not everyone is ready to accept it, and each one must go as far as he can let himself be led along the road to truth. He will return and go still farther, or perhaps step back a while and then return again." (W-PI-132.6:4 & 5)
When we finally completed all our judgements on ourself, have finally completed our proving and KNOW what we truly are, we can say, "Quad Erat Demonstratum" (Q.E.D.) -- "that which was to have been proven." We are then ready to return Home to the Christ Mind in Heaven, Where we really never left, because it was all just our dream of separation and specialness. Then myself and my whole world is totally forgiven, and without a function or a purpose" it merely slips away to (the) nothingness" from which it came.
God gave us the assurance of our Second Coming along with our
First as it always was His Intention for us to be co-creator with Him as
the Christ, in His Heaven. This is totally True, and nothing outside
of It exists. And God continually says to us, "You are still My
holy Son, forever innocent, forever loving and forever loved, as limitless
as your Creator, and completely changeless and forever pure. Therefore,
AWAKEN AND RETURN TO ME. I am your Father and you are My Son." (W-310-311)
The lessons in "A Course In Miracles" are the Thoughts of God as transmitted by His Voice, Holy Spirit, to one of His Sons, Jesus the Christ, to be shared with all those of His other sons who see themselves as separated from His Kingdom and His Love. LISTEN AND REMEMBER
In our creation, God gave us all the Power of Himself, except one. He could create us, but we couldn't create Him. Our mandate was to go on creating as He Thought. But we also had the power the mis-create, have a mistaken thought, if we so chose. God was not concerned however, because He Knew that since there was nothing outside of Himself, even if we temporarily considered a thought outside of His, we would eventually return to His Thought, as there was nothing else. For one fleeting second, we thought of a world of separation and specialness. There God's Voice, our Holy Spirit, told us the difference, and we returned to Him.
What we experience now is that fleeting thought of separation played out over and over in all its myriad of forms. That is our DREAM; that is our experience here; that is all of time, past, present and future.
"Creation is the opposite of all illusions, for creation is
the truth." And those illusions are our dreams, individually
and collectively. Creation is all the Thoughts of God, in numbers
infinite, but in reality, One. His Creation is our surety of His
Oneness. We are all One within Creation, and in each part of us is
the Whole. "We are creation; we the Sons of God." "God's
memory is in our holy minds, which know their oneness and their unity with
their Creator." The memory of our Self as the Christ and God
Himself remains in our spirit mind, and it is there we must go to remember
it again. This means giving up all value and interest in our ego
mind, and letting it return to the nothingness from which it came.
We forgive ourself for what we thought was real as our world
and our ego, see only the Christ in all our brothers, and so remember God,
our SELF and Heaven. Then we are Home, where He would have us be,
back to His Creation and our Reality.