More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
you cannot get peace from strife. Belief in hard makes the world hard. Transfer your allegiance to ease, and the world becomes far lighter.
gross contrast serves only at the initial stage of the spiritual journey. If Advanced Intelligence cannot get your attention through subtle contrasts, it will use more blunt contrasts as educational tools. If you do not feel the nudge, you end up with a slap. Not because pain is God’s will, but because nothing less will get your attention. It is not God’s plan that makes life hard, but human resistance.
Grace is the state of being in which we are loved unconditionally and all that we need is provided for us by the benevolent hand of God.
Remove from your mind the belief that there is something you must do first before you can be happy. Safety, vitality, sustenance, and soul fulfillment are yours by virtue of your identity as the progeny of God. Love is where you are because love is what you are.
Even while you labor under the illusion that you must provide for yourself, God is caring for you.
You participate in a supremely intelligent process far vaster than you can supervise. You may believe you are responsible for your well-being, but you are not. You are responsible to cooperate, not control.
By grace I live. By grace I am released.
You are already worthy.
You were not born to be a passive observer of life. You were born to dive into the adventure and allow Higher Power to operate through you, as well as for you.
Choosing the path of ease does not mean that you get lazy, flee from challenges, or quit if your process grows difficult. It means that you ask Spirit to help you move beyond perceived obstacles.
What is right for you wants to come to you. What is not right for you wants to flee from you. If you have to fight to get or keep something, it doesn’t belong to you and you are better off without it.
Things belong to you not by your manipulation, but by right of your consciousness. Hold your consciousness at the highest elevation you can, and what is yours will know your face.
We must each relate to God in the way that unites us with Him, Her, or It.
everyone who studies A Course in Miracles has resistance. If you had no resistance, you would not need to do the Course. If you had no resistance, you would not be in a body on Earth.
your search for someone who will make you happy is really your search for yourself.
1. Do the Workbook Lessons.
No matter how many Lessons or exercise periods you miss, do not use your lapses as an excuse to feel guilty or beat yourself up. That is exactly what the ego wants you to do. The goal of the Course is to end guilt.
“Delay does not matter in eternity, but it is tragic in time” (T-5.VI.1:3).
Convenience is not something that happens to you. It is something you choose.
Your spiritual connection is more important than anything else you do.
2. Study the Text in the way and order you feel guided.
When you study ACIM, you are immersing your mind in a consciousness, not just information. The goal of the Course is to attain a state of awareness. Studying the Text will take you there as you feel guided. 3. Soothe your resistance.
Kindness heals, and dealing with the ego is not an exception to this principle. The ego believes its job is to protect you from threats. It is determined to fulfill its perceived role, because it believes its life and yours depend on it.
Tell your ego that you mean it no harm and it can continue to do its job, which it holds so dear. Assuage it by letting it know that your intention is to help it fight less and relax more.
Honor your ego by appreciating the job it is doing for you. Your ego marks the identity of the vessel that carries you across the sea of life. It helps you discern your unique vantage point in the universe. As a survival mechanism, it works.
thank your ego for all of its efforts to keep you alive and focused on your human journey. Appreciating your ego will make you and it feel better and clear the pathway to move beyond it. If you work with the ego gently and gradually,
you will gain far more ground than making war on it. When you make war on your ego, it has already won, because it defines itself in terms of war. If you enfold the ego with love, you rise above it and master the resistance it offers. When love and fear meet, only love remains. 4. Notice when and how resistance arises and the form it takes.
Many habits and addictions are forms of resistance, bunkers apparently safe from pain, but effectively safe from love.
The first step to overcoming resistance is to recognize your resistant behavior. No unconscious behavior can long stand in the light of higher awareness.
Identify with the witness rather than the doer. The more you gain perspective, the more leverage you will find to make healthy choices. Beating yourself up for unwanted behaviors never works. Guilt does not stop the pain that causes addiction. It perpetuates it. Inner peace is your strongest ally in any campaign to improve your life.
5. Cultivate habits that truly make you feel good.
When you cultivate activities that truly bring you joy, you establish yourself in the domain of the soul.
Seeing the Christ in your brother feels a lot better than regarding him as the devil. Being gentle with yourself feels a lot better than beating yourself up. Just keep doing what makes you feel best, and what is less than best will gradually disappear from your experience.
“I am never upset for the reason I think” (W, Lesson 5). We choose upset because we find it more attractive than peace. Events don’t make us upset. We make ourselves upset and then designate events as the cause. We could just as easily—far more easily —choose peace. “I choose the joy of God instead of pain” (W, Lesson 190).
Upset is a lens we choose to filter experiences. You participate in what disturbs you.
The Spiritual Eye sees through a different lens. It sees everything as grounds for gratitude, the shortest route to success and fulfillment. Resistance is not something that happens to you. It is something you choose because you believe you receive value from it.
The ego actively resists any attempt to alter the world it has created. What the ego does not tell you is that the world it has created is killing you.
The Holy Spirit regards change in an entirely different way. It welcomes, celebrates, and makes positive use of change.
Define all change as good, even if you don’t see the blessing at the moment. It is there and will reveal itself.
Stop fighting life and let it love you. Miracles are seeking you. Now you must let them find you.
A Course in Miracles views time in a very different light. It tells us that our true Self lives far beyond time, and “the purpose of time is to enable you to learn how to use time constructively” (T-1.I.15:2).
Time helps us focus and discover the difference between the minutes that bring us joy and those that bring us sorrow.
Time further urges us to make the most of the space between when we arrive in the world and when we depart.
So the secret to triumph over the tyranny of time is to stay in love. Not simply romantic love, but the awareness that love is everywhere and you are in its midst.
If it is not now, it is not. How can a world of time and place exist, if you remain as God created you?
ACIM invites us to step out of time into eternity. Eternity is not a realm you enter after you die. It is an expanded reality that exists now.
You cannot get to eternity through time.
Eternity does not start when time ends. It is already here, welcoming us to e...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
ACIM assures that you have a right to enter heaven now because you are already good enough.
The ego uses time as a tactic to delay the experience of oneness.
