A Course in Miracles Made Easy: Mastering the Journey from Fear to Love

by Alan Cohen

the only real choice is between fear and 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 images we impress upon our mind, especially when accompanied by emotion, yield the same experience whether they are true or fictional.

The voice of God is your own voice. When God speaks to you—which occurs every moment, whether or not you are aware of it—you are receiving guidance from your own Self.

When you talk to God, you are having a conversation with yourself. The “I am” that you are is the “I am” that God is.

It means, more fundamentally, that 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.

When our life becomes empty and burdensome, we reach for higher answers.

We have delved as far as we can into the world of illusion and we are hungry for the truth.

Be not content with littleness . . . Yet what you do not realize, each time you choose, is that your choice is your evaluation of yourself.

Choose littleness and you will not have peace, for you will have judged yourself unworthy of it

Albert Einstein is said to have noted, “Reality is an illusion, albeit a persistent one.”

We are each an expression of God, a holy idea breathed into existence.

This might be my favorite thing I underlined, but I don't think I've ever highlighted so much in any book I've read. This book gave me so much food for thought.

Einstein noted, “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

Jonathan Swift declared, “When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.”

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.

We are all speaking only to our own self.

Wrath is entirely a human experience, incited by a sense of guilt, fear, powerlessness, and separation. None of these traits belong to God. All the scary tales you have heard about an angry, punitive God are the result of anthropomorphizing divinity with disowned humanity.

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.

Any savior you project to be outside yourself denies the God within you.

Like the Christ, Buddha is a state of consciousness, the awareness of divinity within you and all around you. If you limit holiness to one body or personality and you define all other beings as less than divine, you are fabricating a god that is less than God.

He does not seek our worship. He seeks our worthship.

Release your partner from your projections and you will recognize both of you as divine beings so brilliant in light that you could hardly look upon one another. Then you will have the relationship your heart desires.

Thus we are saved from our illusions and projections and we create a relationship with the person God created, not the story we made up about him or her.

Authority figures are really authority figurines, animated by the power you have attributed to them.

Everything you can imagine and experience is within you.

all that you seek, you are.

Atonement is the undoing of the world of fear and the return to love.

Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly.

Prove that you are deeper, richer, and stronger than any apparently foolish, unconscious, or evil behavior someone acts out.

Simultaneously affirm that the sins you perceive you have committed against others have not harmed them.

All the results of sin, against ourselves or others, are simply a sto...

When we practice that sin has no effect, we...

and o...

It was not the act that hurt, but your interpretation of the act. Just as you chose an interpretation that hurts, you can choose one that heals.

No matter what bleak identity or obligation the world lays over you, you are innocent, absolutely lovable, and deserving of only good. You remain as God created you.

Love, which created me, is what I am.

Tip the balance of justice in your favor by realizing that the only real justice is forgiveness.

No one has the power to rob your happiness, unless you give that power to them.

The key to overcoming sin is to change your thoughts about the past so they do not encroach on the holy present moment.

The only place that painful memory existed in the entire universe was in my mind.

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”

“God does not forgive because He never has condemned”

Forgiveness is required only by those who have condemned.

The future will be like the past only if you keep thinking the same thoughts that created the past.

If you keep hitting your head with a hammer, it feels good when you stop, but you could have felt good without the hammer beating. Contrast is a helpful teacher, but after a point it becomes a vicious taskmaster. There are easier ways to learn.

God takes no pleasure in your pain and doesn’t punish you. Neither need you.

Mark Twain reportedly said, “Comparison is the death of joy.”