In this School For A Course In Miracles (SFACIM) video conversation, we read and explore the section “Entering the Ark” (ACIM, T-20.IV)
For context from the prior section in the text, “Sin as an Adjustment” covered in this recent ACIMblog post (ACIM, T-20.III), we read the last paragraph from that previous section:
“Your gift unto your brother has given me the certainty our union will be soon. Share, then, this faith with me, and know that it is justified. There is no fear in perfect love because it knows no sin, and it must look on others as on itself. Looking with charity within, what can it fear without? The innocent see safety, and the pure in heart see God within His Son, and look unto the Son to lead them to the Father. And where else would they go but where they will to be? You and your brother now will lead the other to the Father as surely as God created His Son holy, and kept him so. In your brother is the light of God’s eternal promise of your immortality. See him as sinless, and there can be no fear in you. (ACIM, T-20.III.11:1-9)
When we see everyone we meet, interact with (in person or via our communication technologies, or even think about) as sinless, innocent, and free of guilt for the impossible crime of separation (or any variation of that insane idea that ego can contrive) we restore the certainty of our peace, because we have rejoined our Inner Kindness Teacher (a.k.a. the Holy Spirit or the Jesus of ACIM) which is the source of that certainty and peace in our mind.
Here are the first three paragraphs from “Entering the Ark” (ACIM, T-20.IV)
“Nothing can hurt you unless you give it the power to do so. Yet you give power as the laws of this world interpret giving; as you give you lose. It is not up to you to give power at all. Power is of God, given by Him and reawakened by the Holy Spirit, Who knows that as you give you gain. He gives no power to sin, and therefore it has none; nor to its results as this world sees them,—sickness and death and misery and pain. These things have not occurred because the Holy Spirit sees them not, and gives no power to their seeming source. Thus would He keep you free of them. Being without illusion of what you are, the Holy Spirit merely gives everything to God, Who has already given and received all that is true. The untrue He has neither received nor given.
Sin has no place in Heaven, where its results are alien and can no more enter than can their source. And therein lies your need to see your brother sinless. In him is Heaven. See sin in him instead, and Heaven is lost to you. But see him as he is, and what is yours shines from him to you. Your savior gives you only love, but what you would receive of him is up to you. It lies in him to overlook all your mistakes, and therein lies his own salvation. And so it is with yours. Salvation is a lesson in giving, as the Holy Spirit interprets it. It is the reawakening of the laws of God in minds that have established other laws, and given them power to enforce what God created not.
Your insane laws were made to guarantee that you would make mistakes, and give them power over you by accepting their results as your just due. What could this be but madness? And is it this that you would see within your savior from insanity? He is as free from this as you are, and in the freedom that you see in him you see your own. For this you share. What God has given follows His laws, and His alone. Nor is it possible for those who follow them to suffer the results of any other source.”
In our discussion about these paragraphs, we often think of power as having “power over” something, which implies a subject and an object, a subjugator and a thing or person subjugated, implying conflict and duality. It is difficult for our dualistic dreaming minds to imagine power that doesn’t oppose, because in Perfect Oneness, there is nothing to conflict with what is not itself, as there is nothing else.
The phrase “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” attributed to philosopher George Santayana, suggests that failing to learn from history can lead to repeating the same mistakes. This idea emphasizes the importance of understanding historical events to avoid similar outcomes in the future. If we don’t remember to forgive (undoing historically troubling beliefs) … and gradually generalize that forgiveness practice to everything that “pushes our buttons,” we will give ourselves more opportunities to learn our forgiveness lessons until we voluntarily choose to consistently undo (with Holy Spirit’s help) our investment in insanity. The only insane choice is believing that we are different, the basis for the erroneous and forgivable belief in sin, guilt, and fear. The only reason for this wacko choice is needless festering self-hate from fantasizing that we trashed Perfect Oneness, resulting in repressed, unconscious (yet unfounded) guilt.
We’ve all been taken in by the ego “hook, line, and sinker,” so it takes gentle, patient, persistent practice in watching our minds for condemning thoughts that differ in form, but offer the ego’s same abysmal guilty content. We seem to be compelled to keep choosing the masochistic options of self-hatred over and over, until we allow the Holy Spirit’s rebuttal to the ego’s insanity to make the correction in our mind. Sigmund Freud described this practice as “repetition compulsion.”
Here is the Wikipedia overview of this proclivity, which seems to apply to every ego:
“Repetition compulsion is the unconscious tendency of a person to repeat a traumatic event or its circumstances. This may take the form of symbolically or literally re-enacting the event, or putting oneself in situations where the event is likely to occur again. Repetition compulsion can also take the form of dreams in which memories and feelings of what happened are repeated, and in cases of psychosis, may even be hallucinated.
As a “key component in Freud’s understanding of mental life, ‘repetition compulsion’ … describes the pattern whereby people endlessly repeat patterns of behaviour which were difficult or distressing in earlier life”.
While not denying behavior, ACIM draws our attention inexorably back to the mind, and specifically our decision to want to believe in separation, separate interests, and differences – the cause of all behaviors and effects observed on the level of form.
Metaphorically, we abandon the ego’s Titanic dream (including our obsession with rearranging the metaphorical deck chairs on that holodeck of duality) and instead embark via the forgiveness ramp of the Holy Spirit’s Ark of Safety (ACIM, T-28.VII) and of Peace.
(From the late 1960s through the mid-1980s, I was involved with a metaphysical study group in California called Creative Dynamics. In the recording, I misspoke slightly; the correct slogans for this group were “individual responsibility” and “freedom through understanding.”)
(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 Sunday, June 15, 2025.)
