More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Miracles. Every moment, the Course tells us, offers us a choice between fear and love.
Miracles are the natural outcome of choosing love.
Fear hurts and love heals. All else is detail.
Boil every choice down to what heals versus what hurts, answer fear with love, and you will find the peace you seek.
The journey to God is merely the reawakening of the knowledge of where you are always, and what you are forever.
Psychologists tell us that the subconscious cannot distinguish between reality and imagination. The images we impress upon our mind, especially when accompanied by emotion, yield the same experience whether they are true or fictional. When hypnotists touch a pencil eraser to a hypnotized person’s forearm and tell the person that the eraser is a lit cigarette, the arm blisters. When a lit cigarette is touched to the forearm, but identified as a pencil eraser, no blister develops. ACIM tells us, “The thoughts you hold are mighty, and illusions are as strong in their effects as is the truth”
The mind is very powerful, and never loses its creative force. It never sleeps. Every instant it is creating. It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power surge that can literally move mountains . . . There are no idle thoughts. All thinking produces form at some level.
The premise is that success and happiness are unattainable illusions, while struggle and suffering are realities we must live with. And misery does love company. A Course in Miracles has another idea. It tells us, “Nothing the world believes is true” (W-139.7:1), and asks us to remember, “I am entitled to miracles” (W, Lesson 77). Happiness, well-being, and success are your birthright and your destiny. All else is a trick of the mind.
Most of the people who have changed the world for the better were told, “Get real.” The most brilliant agents of positive change have been branded insane, shamed, imprisoned, tortured, and killed. Einstein noted, “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean that you can establish the curriculum. It means only that you can elect what you want to take at a given time. The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite. —
All journeys outward ultimately lead to the journey inward, where everything you seek already exists and awaits your joyous acceptance.
I am not a separate person writing this book to you or for you. You have written this book to and for yourself, through me. I am the agent you have enlisted to remind you of what you already know.
Metaphysically speaking, I did write A Course in Miracles, and so did you. Whatever comes into our field of vision represents our consciousness. “You spot it, you got it.” Projection tells us that words of divinity come from outside of us, trying to find their way in. Extension tells us that spiritually powerful ideas arise from inside of us, finding their way out. Ultimately there is no in and out. Everything you can imagine and experience is within you. When projection gives way to extension, you are no longer separate from your creations, and all that you seek, you are.
Atonement is the undoing of the world of fear and the return to love. It is the awakening from the dream of separation, taking back projection, and restoring the condition of wholeness. It is the releasing of the limited identity as body or ego, and the reclaiming of our true identity as Spirit. It is the evaporation of the illusions of sin, loss, and death, and the homecoming to our natural state of peace.
You do not have to continue to believe what is not true unless you choose to do so.
The atonement is the twinkling of an eye in which misperception gives way to the real world. Heaven has been here all the time; we just weren’t seeing it.
There is no world apart from what you wish, and herein lies your ultimate release. Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly.
Love, which created me, is what I am.
“Your past has no power to haunt you. You are haunting yourself by focusing on a past that hurts.”
The future you expect is a projection of your beliefs about the past. The future will be like the past only if you keep thinking the same thoughts that created the past. When you change your thoughts about the past, you change your thoughts about the future, and thus you create a better future. Your future, like your past, is a story you have made up. If you regard yourself and life through the lens of fear, guilt, and mistrust, you will expect a morbid future. If you regard yourself and life through the lens of love, innocence, and faith, you will expect a bright future.
More accurately, the ego’s preoccupation with control keeps you unaware that something wonderful is already happening.
There is no other shoe. Well-being is your natural state and all you deserve.
Guilt is punishing yourself before God doesn’t. It is an unnecessary prepayment of retribution for wrongdoing. As a child you were taught that pain buys you freedom.
Sin is offset by pain, which leads to freedom. So now when you believe you have sinned, you beat yourself up and mete out your own punishment
before God gives you a worse dose. “The ego believes that by punishing itself it will mitigate the punishment of God” (T-5.V.5:6). But there is no worse dose to come. You did it all to yourself.
“Comparison is the death of joy.”
Your wholeness is intact, and your worthiness was never in question. You do not have to compete to prove yourself, for you have unique gifts that no one else can deliver.
continue. People who hurt others are hurting themselves. They are disconnected from love.
we must reframe crime as a call for love. ACIM tells us that every act is either an expression of love or a call for love. Anyone
results. When meditation practices were introduced into prison programs in the country of Senegal, two penitentiaries were ultimately closed. (For a brief overview of this phenomenon, watch “The Square Root of One Percent” on YouTube.)
ACIM tells us that the place to begin all correction is within our own consciousness.
When you are free of pain, you are incapable of inflicting pain.
Thus we heal suffering at its root, not its symptoms. All societal healing begins with self-healing.
But sin and punishment have no place in a universe founded in love.
Mind is the only cause, and body is the effect. “I am affected only by my thoughts”
First, recognize that no person, group, situation, or condition has the power to take away your happiness. No one. No thing. Never. The experience of joy is your God-given right, a sovereign domain you alone command. “I have a kingdom I must rule” (W-236.1:1).
they cannot remove your peace unless you give them that power.
were
The monk defined danger not as the loss of
physical freedom. He defined danger as the loss of spiritual peace.
“in my defenselessness my safety lies,”
you have graduated from the Uncle Morty School of Awakening. Either he will go away or he will no longer be able to ruin your Thanksgiving. In either case you are free.
