In this video conversation, we read and explored two sections from the text of A Course In Miracles: Bringing Fantasy to Truth (ACIM, T-17.I) and The Forgiven World (ACIM, T-17.II).
This conversation was facilitated by Bruce Rawles as part of the School For A Course In Miracles (SFACIM) curriculum hosted by Lyn Corona and Tim Wise.
Fantasy is a term that appears 75 times in ACIM. Among many related ideas, we briefly touched on a specific fantasy term: Solipsism. If we exclude anyone or anything from our Identity, we have fallen into the ego’s trap, reflecting the original prodigal idea – the Authority Problem. This misinterpretation elevates our personal separate identity (in imaginary isolation) at the expense of the real interest of awakening from the dream of duality and bringing everyone with us in eternal innocence. ACIM systematically undoes ego’s solipsistic narcissistic self-centeredness by consistent forgiveness.
As a result of our choice for ego’s fantasy thought system, the Course also shows how we can see these projected thoughts as forgivable hallucinations.
The Truth about our eternally shared reality – our eternally shared identity – waits with infinite patience for us to forgive our projections – both onto the world and onto our silly, seemingly separate selves – so that consistent peace will be restored. The Truth of our being is closer than breath or heartbeat since it is beyond space and time because we are beyond space and time. Our Truth is beyond any pathetic feeble fantasy, however awfully alluring, temporarily tempting, or gruesomely grandiose. Our grandeur waits for our awareness, our welcome:
“You will first dream of peace, and then awaken to it. ²Your first exchange of what you made for what you want is the exchange of nightmares for the happy dreams of love. ³In these lie your true perceptions, for the Holy Spirit corrects the world of dreams, where all perception is. ⁴Knowledge needs no correction. ⁵Yet the dreams of love lead unto knowledge. ⁶In them you see nothing fearful, and because of this they are the welcome that you offer knowledge. ⁷Love waits on welcome, not on time, and the real world is but your welcome of what always was. ⁸Therefore the call of joy is in it, and your glad response is your awakening to what you have not lost.” (ACIM, T-13.VII.9:1-8)
We’re afraid of the simplicity of salvation; the tiny step of true little willingness is the smallest ever taken. The melos – as Ken Wapnick points out, the music beyond the individual notes, the changeless dwelling place in our mind is what we all really want.
“Listen, perhaps you catch a hint of an ancient state not quite forgotten; dim, perhaps, and yet not altogether unfamiliar, like a song whose name is long forgotten, and the circumstances in which you heard completely unremembered. ²Not the whole song has stayed with you, but just a little wisp of melody, attached not to a person or a place or anything particular. ³But you remember, from just this little part, how lovely was the song, how wonderful the setting where you heard it, and how you loved those who were there and listened with you.
The notes are nothing. ²Yet you have kept them with you, not for themselves, but as a soft reminder of what would make you weep if you remembered how dear it was to you. ³You could remember, yet you are afraid, believing you would lose the world you learned since then. ⁴And yet you know that nothing in the world you learned is half so dear as this. ⁵Listen, and see if you remember an ancient song you knew so long ago and held more dear than any melody you taught yourself to cherish since.” (ACIM, T-21.I.6:1–7:5)
Gently, patiently forgiving ourselves for our lapses in due diligence, dedication, and total commitment is key to “… removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence (ACIM, T-in.1:7.) In Lesson 95, we’re given the entire “block removal” process – looking with our Inner Kindness Teacher at the ego’s nothingness. We’ve made the trivial into a huge somethingness, a proverbial mountain out of a molehill.
“The Holy Spirit is not delayed in His teaching by your mistakes.²He can be held back only by your unwillingness to let them go.³Let us therefore be determined, particularly for the next week or so, to be willing to forgive ourselves for our lapses in diligence, and our failures to follow the instructions for practicing the day’s idea.⁴This tolerance for weakness will enable us to overlook it, rather than give it power to delay our learning.⁵If we give it power to do this, we are regarding it as strength, and are confusing strength with weakness.” (ACIM, W-95.8:1-5)
These little holy instants are the cumulative solution to bring us to the ultimate “top of the ladder” Holy Instant where we abandon grievances, victimhood, martyrdom, self-pity, and any residual dualistic dreaming and return to uncompromised, unassailable joyous peace.
Here are the first 3 paragraphs of Bringing Fantasy to Truth (ACIM, T-17.I):
“The betrayal of the Son of God lies only in illusions, and all his “sins” are but his own imagining. ²His reality is forever sinless. ³He need not be forgiven but awakened. ⁴In his dreams he has betrayed himself, his brothers and his God. ⁵Yet what is done in dreams has not been really done. ⁶It is impossible to convince the dreamer that this is so, for dreams are what they are because of their illusion of reality. ⁷Only in waking is the full release from them, for only then does it become perfectly apparent that they had no effect upon reality at all, and did not change it. ⁸Fantasies change reality. ⁹That is their purpose. ¹⁰They cannot do so in reality, but they can do so in the mind that would have reality be different.
2. It is, then, only your wish to change reality that is fearful, because by your wish you think you have accomplished what you wish. ²This strange position, in a sense, acknowledges your power. ³Yet by distorting it and devoting it to “evil,” it also makes it unreal. ⁴You cannot be faithful to two masters who ask conflicting things of you. ⁵What you use in fantasy you deny to truth. ⁶Yet what you give to truth to use for you is safe from fantasy.
3. When you maintain that there must be an order of difficulty in miracles, all you mean is that there are some things you would withhold from truth. ²You believe truth cannot deal with them only because you would keep them from truth. ³Very simply, your lack of faith in the power that heals all pain arises from your wish to retain some aspects of reality for fantasy. ⁴If you but realized what this must do to your appreciation of the whole! ⁵What you reserve for yourself, you take away from Him Who would release you. ⁶Unless you give it back, it is inevitable that your perspective on reality be warped and uncorrected.”
The next section is Here are the first 3 paragraphs of The Forgiven World (ACIM, T-17.II):
“Can you imagine how beautiful those you forgive will look to you? ²In no fantasy have you ever seen anything so lovely. ³Nothing you see here, sleeping or waking, comes near to such loveliness. ⁴And nothing will you value like unto this, nor hold so dear. ⁵Nothing that you remember that made your heart sing with joy has ever brought you even a little part of the happiness this sight will bring you. ⁶For you will see the Son of God. ⁷You will behold the beauty the Holy Spirit loves to look upon, and which He thanks the Father for. ⁸He was created to see this for you, until you learned to see it for yourself. ⁹And all His teaching leads to seeing it and giving thanks with Him.
2. This loveliness is not a fantasy. ²It is the real world, bright and clean and new, with everything sparkling under the open sun. ³Nothing is hidden here, for everything has been forgiven and there are no fantasies to hide the truth. ⁴The bridge between that world and this is so little and so easy to cross, that you could not believe it is the meeting place of worlds so different. ⁵Yet this little bridge is the strongest thing that touches on this world at all. ⁶This little step, so small it has escaped your notice, is a stride through time into eternity, beyond all ugliness into beauty that will enchant you, and will never cease to cause you wonderment at its perfection.
3. This step, the smallest ever taken, is still the greatest accomplishment of all in God’s plan of Atonement. ²All else is learned, but this is given, complete and wholly perfect. ³No one but Him Who planned salvation could complete it thus. ⁴The real world, in its loveliness, you learn to reach. ⁵Fantasies are all undone, and no one and nothing remain still bound by them, and by your own forgiveness you are free to see. ⁶Yet what you see is only what you made, with the blessing of your forgiveness on it. ⁷And with this final blessing of God’s Son upon himself, the real perception, born of the new perspective he has learned, has served its purpose.”
We also mentioned a practice suggested to Gary Renard by his teachers, reading the “The ‘Hero’ of the Dream” (ACIM, T-27.VIII) every day for a month; a great idea. As Gary’s teachers remind, repetition of right-minded thinking isn’t just a good idea, it is essential; the heart of our mind training and the “… complete reversal of thought (ACIM, M-24.4:1.)
Ultimately, our attempts to betray our real identity are pointless since the fake separate ego identity is the dream we’ll all awaken from after we completely forgive ourselves for “… what never happened” (ACIM, C-1.6:2) in eternity.
We’re all in this thought reversal together. As Ram Dass mentioned, we’re all walking each other home.
(This conversation was facilitated by Bruce Rawles as part of the School For A Course In Miracles (SFACIM) curriculum hosted by Lyn Corona and Tim Wise. This YouTube video recording was made on December 8, 2024.)
Here are some prior posts on ACIMblog.com that refer to fantasy and forgiveness.