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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Alan Cohen
Read between
August 22 - August 31, 2025
Everything difficult is the nightmare of fear superimposed over the presence of love.
Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.
We have all been lost, and we are all finding our way home.
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.
“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 only cure for a mistaken identity is to remember who you are.
your world will be liberated when you bring the presence of God to the world simply by being yourself. What saves you, along with the world, is your own true Self.
If you could accept the world as meaningless and let the truth be written upon it for you, it would make you indescribably happy.
When the world does not understand, accept, or support you, you do not walk alone. And if you should lose faith in yourself, God still has faith in you.
“Nothing the world believes is true”
“Fear is that little darkroom where negatives are developed,”
You can indeed afford to laugh at fear thoughts, remembering that God goes with you wherever you go.
“Reality is an illusion, albeit a persistent one.”
“God did not create a meaningless world.”
“What He creates is not apart from Him, and nowhere does the Father end, the Son begin as something separate from Him”
Einstein noted, “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
Your purpose is to recognize the greatness within you and deliver it.
Love waits on welcome, not on time, and the real world is but your welcome of what always was.
Therefore the call of joy is in it, and your glad response is your awakening to what you have not lost.
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.
Our experience springs, more accurately, from our in-vironment. When we fight the outer world, we are the frightened cowboy shooting wildly at a sheet, battling our own projections. When the outer world is kind to us, we are being kind to ourselves, immersed in the projection of our loving thoughts.
Your thoughts are the film, your mind is the projector, and the sheet is the world. You will never find peace by blaming external people and events for your misery, or by giving them credit for your salvation. You are doing it all to and for yourself.
Projection always sees your wishes in others.
Projection makes perception, and you cannot see beyond it.
When I lived in an organic farming community, one morning I sat on the porch of the bunkhouse, watching members walk across a grassy area to the dining hall. Beside the path, Pete the duck sat and quacked at people as they walked by. A professional singer was the first to pass by Pete that morning. Upon hearing him, she stopped and told him, “How nice of you to sing me a morning song!” The next woman along the path was rather overweight. When she heard Pete quack in her direction, she scolded him, “You’re always quacking for more food, Pete. It’s time you stuck to your diet!” The final person
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The immature mind sees God from the viewpoint of a powerless child under the thumb of an oppressive parent. The mature mind recognizes us as offspring of a kind and forgiving God who would not hurt his beloved children any more than we would choose to hurt our own.
You believe there are people and groups outside of you that have power over you: spouses, parents, landlords, neighbors, bosses, corporations, governments, and religions, to name a few. There are no external sources. The source of your experience with these “others” is your mind.
Ideas leave not their source . . . What is projected out, and seems to be external to the mind, is not outside at all, but an effect of what is in . . .
“Whatever suffers is not part of me”
there is nothing you could do that could cause you to lose the grace of God,
You remain as God created you.
Love, which created me, is what I am.
Release your brother and yourself from the illusion that his actions can determine your experience. No one has the power to rob your happiness, unless you give that power to them. No one can drive you crazy unless you accept the passenger’s seat. A Course in Miracles shows us how to take our power back and drive rather than being driven.
“I have given everything I see . . . all the meaning that it has for me”
You have had billions of moments of experiences. The moments you give your attention to are the ones that generate your current experience. When you focus on painful memories, you create a painful past and drag it into the present. When you focus on joyful memories, you create a joyful past and experience peace in the present moment.
“The past is over. It can touch me not”
“All your past except its beauty is gone, and nothing is left but a blessing”
The future you expect is a projection of your beliefs about 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.
the ego’s preoccupation with control keeps you unaware that something wonderful is already happening.
ACIM tells us that every act is either an expression of love or a call for love.
The Course tells us that any illness and any pain, physical or emotional, is our way of holding someone else guilty for hurting us. If we did not blame others, the Course explains, we would never be sick.
Mind is the only cause, and body is the effect. “I am affected only by my thoughts”
Your body speaks in physical condition what your mouth is not saying with words.
ACIM tells us that even the slightest sigh is an expression of a belief in victimhood
