In this School For A Course In Miracles (SFACIM) video conversation, our opening meditation was the first 3 review lessons in Lesson 60 of the Workbook of A Course In Miracles:
“1. (46) God is the Love in which I forgive.
²God does not forgive because He has never condemned. ³The blameless cannot blame, and those who have accepted their innocence see nothing to forgive. ⁴Yet forgiveness is the means by which I will recognize my innocence. ⁵It is the reflection of God’s Love on earth. ⁶It will bring me near enough to Heaven that the Love of God can reach down to me and raise me up to Him.
2. (47) God is the strength in which I trust.
²It is not my own strength through which I forgive. ³It is through the strength of God in me, which I am remembering as I forgive. ⁴As I begin to see, I recognize His reflection on earth. ⁵I forgive all things because I feel the stirring of His strength in me. ⁶And I begin to remember the Love I chose to forget, but which has not forgotten me.
3. (48) There is nothing to fear.
²How safe the world will look to me when I can see it! ³It will not look anything like what I imagine I see now. ⁴Everyone and everything I see will lean toward me to bless me. ⁵I will recognize in everyone my dearest Friend. ⁶What could there be to fear in a world that I have forgiven, and that has forgiven me?”
We don’t need to guess what real (eternal, unchanging, undivided, undifferentiated) Love is; we just need to keep practicing true forgiveness, which reflects that real Love and undoes the silly, maladaptive, fearful thought system we’ve been investing in for so long!
When we truly forgive, we’re using the strength of the Holy Spirit (a.k.a. Jesus of the Course or our Inner Kindness Teacher or any ego-free presence) to guide our mind to the altar of true compassion, true justice, where the separation never happened. Otherwise, we’ll be using “forgiveness-to-destroy”. When I’m sane, I “make no decisions by myself” (ACIM, T-30.I.2:2), in other words, deciding as a blind and blinding ego. We’re given some superb guidelines in the “Rules For Decision.” ACIM is profoundly authoritative (gentle, patient, yet unflinchingly dedicated only to Truth), yet never authoritarian; there is zero coercion in the Course. This is epitomized in the simple 4-word italicized advice: “Do not fight yourself.” (ACIM, T-30.I.1:7)
We then read Perception and Choice (ACIM, T-25.III) from the Text of A Course In Miracles and had a lively discussion, as usual! Here are the first three paragraphs of that section, which Ken Wapnick covers from pages 10-14 in Volume 4 of the Journey Through The Text of A Course In Miracles 4-volume set.
“To the extent to which you value guilt, to that extent will you perceive a world in which attack is justified. ²To the extent to which you recognize that guilt is meaningless, to that extent you will perceive attack cannot be justified. ³This is in accord with perception’s fundamental law: You see what you believe is there, and you believe it there because you want it there. ⁴Perception has no other law than this. ⁵The rest but stems from this, to hold it up and offer it support. ⁶This is perception’s form, adapted to this world, of God’s more basic law; that love creates itself, and nothing but itself.
God’s laws do not obtain directly to a world perception rules, for such a world could not have been created by the Mind to which perception has no meaning. ²Yet are His laws reflected everywhere. ³Not that the world where this reflection is, is real at all. ⁴Only because His Son believes it is, and from His Son’s belief He could not let Himself be separate entirely. ⁵He could not enter His Son’s insanity with him, but He could be sure His sanity went there with him, so he could not be lost forever in the madness of his wish.
Perception rests on choosing; knowledge does not. ²Knowledge has but one law because it has but one Creator. ³But this world has two who made it, and they do not see it as the same. ⁴To each it has a different purpose, and to each it is a perfect means to serve the goal for which it is perceived. ⁵For specialness, it is the perfect frame to set it off; the perfect battleground to wage its wars, the perfect shelter for illusions which it would make real. ⁶Not one but it upholds in its perception; not one but can be fully justified.
Ego’s motto: “My terrorizing will continue until morale improves.” The ego always defends projection, attack, and defense by refusing to forgive what is completely illusory and therefore always forgivable. We either refuse to acknowledge Truth if we’re in “ego mode” or we refuse to acknowledge illusion when guided by our Inner Kindness Teacher. In our sane moments, we merely watch the ego drama without condemnation: the silly, forgivable belief in separation, the alleged crime of sin, the imprisonment of guilt, the tyranny of fear, the repression of our experience resulting from our schizophrenic choice, the attempted projection of our internal dislike, and the perception of adversaries “outside” us. In ego mode, we’re like toddlers fighting each other in a playground sandbox, brandishing tiny plastic swords against each other with our petty grievances in an absurd dream of duality.
The Holy Spirit doesn’t acknowledge illusion, since the Holy Spirit’s correction is a reflection of Truth; it is the memory of what we really are as the One Christ Mind, that includes all Creation. Our Inner Kindness Teacher doesn’t fight against illusions; it merely suggests that we can drop our pathetic defenses, and stand up from the metaphoric sandbox in our mind, leaving ego’s dismal battlefield “playground” or put another way, leave the film noir horror flick we call dualistic, polarized, adversarial thinking.
“I will love you and honor you and maintain complete respect for what you have made, but I will not uphold it unless it is true. ⁸I will never forsake you any more than God will, but I must wait as long as you choose to forsake yourself. ⁹Because I wait in love and not in impatience, you will surely ask me truly. ¹⁰I will come in response to a single unequivocal call.” (ACIM, T-4.III.7:7-10)
During the conversation, I recalled a vivid nocturnal dream, which I wrote about in my second book, The Geometry Code
Universal Symbolic Mirrors of Natural Laws Within Us; Friendly Reminders of Inclusion to Forgive the Dreamer of Separation. I now share that excerpt here, starting on page 64, from the chapter “Mentalism: 1st of the 7 Hermetic Laws”:
“The Projection Room (a nocturnal dream)
A decade or two ago, I had a nocturnal dream (to distinguish from the ordinary, diurnal waking dream I call my life) that had a profound effect on me. In this dream, I found myself in a smaller room slightly above and adjoining a much larger room which was a vast theater. I could tell that the room had been used for countless eons, yet now was – in a peaceful yet almost eerie way – quiet except for faintest echoes of what I could only imagine were innumerable theatrical presentations, movies and dramatic enactments. There was no color or lighting in either room, yet both were bright and completely comfortable; I felt truly peaceful there, standing in what appeared to be the smaller room. I remember looking through the opening (not really a doorway) into the now empty theater and I couldn’t see any seating, yet I sensed from the inward echoes that there had been tremendous activity there covering an unimaginable spectrum of events and variety of vicarious experience.
When I first recalled this dream, I didn’t grok the significance of the smaller adjoining room. Recently, reviewing the dream again, the metaphor of this being the projection room was a huge ‘Aha’ experience! This ‘room’ (the divided mind) is where we choose to project the university of our life’s classroom. I was fixated on the theater and it’s screen rather than realizing that the source of the presentations was in the ‘upper room’ of the mental (causal) realm. The theater was empty, meaning that from the perspective of where I was in the ‘projection room’, nothing was really happening on the big screen; it was all a gigantic past event. If I were to jump back into the theater, all the drama and intensity of fleeting events would appear to be important, yet it would be completely unchangeable from that vantage point. Only from within the projection room would I be able to make any meaningful change, by realizing that my mind was the source of the interpretation; changing which teacher (Infinite Self or personal self) would make all the difference!”
We took our sanity (the correction of the Holy Spirit a.k.a. Jesus of the Course a.k.a. our Inner Kindness Teacher a.k.a. any ego-free presence in our mind) into the dream to restore the harmlessness and neutrality of everything we made to fight us and
“The secret of salvation is but this: that you are doing this unto yourself. ²No matter what the form of the attack, this still is true. ³Whoever takes the role of enemy and of attacker, still is this the truth. ⁴Whatever seems to be the cause of any pain and suffering you feel, this is still true. ⁵For you would not react at all to figures in a dream you knew that you were dreaming. ⁶Let them be as hateful and as vicious as they may, they could have no effect on you unless you failed to recognize it is your dream.” (ACIM, T-27.VIII.10:1-6)
Another metaphor for the Holy Spirit’s generalized correction for our highly complex and specific dreams is something I learned about listening to a Bioneers conference program on community radio KVMR-FM over two decades ago. In this episode, the narrators talked about an innovative solution to the toxins in chain saw oil. Someone figured out how to incorporate microscopic spores that broke down, neutralized, and digested toxins in the oil, so that each droplet, regardless of how tiny, had the “seed” of undoing the harmfulness of the original product. Seems like a great metaphor for how we can (and ultimately will want to) use every tiny ego thought, grievance, annoyance, or out-and-out outrage as the mathematically perfect classroom for undoing ego, one thought at a time. Here’s a possibly related product.
“Nothing at all has happened but that you have put yourself to sleep, and dreamed a dream in which you were an alien to yourself, and but a part of someone else’s dream. The miracle does not awaken you, but merely shows you who the dreamer is. It teaches you there is a choice of dreams while you are still asleep, depending on the purpose of your dreaming. Do you wish for dreams of healing, or for dreams of death? ⁵A dream is like a memory in that it pictures what you wanted shown to you.” (ACIM, T-28.II.4:1-5)
The simplicity of our perpetual opportunity for peace is that we constantly can … and do … choose between the insanity of special, separate “consolation prize” disappointing interests, of the one truly shared interest of returning home together. We realize that the ego’s propaganda isn’t just mediocre; it never works; it never brings us peace of mind; it always brings only war. Every instant of every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every year of our lives, we have the choice for sanity or insanity, peace or war, love or fear.
What is precious is each opportunity – every instant! – to forgive; yet we needn’t feel guilty for “squandering” or missing an opportunity to forgive and be peaceful. We haven’t damaged our eternal inheritance of Truth, sinlessness, holiness, innocence, and completion. We merely (needlessly) missed another opportunity to forgive and experience the deep, profound serenity of disabling ego’s blathering, blundering, blustering projection machine. We just need to metaphorically get up out of our chairs and take ego’s hotline-to-our-mind phone off the hook (or turn the ringer off on newer phones) to stop its automated telemarketing nonsense from disturbing our tranquility!
“The happy learner cannot feel guilty about learning. ²This is so essential to learning that it should never be forgotten. ³The guiltless learner learns easily because his thoughts are free. ⁴Yet this entails the recognition that guilt is interference, not salvation, and serves no useful function at all.” (ACIM, T-14.III.1:1-4)
Our closing meditation was the last 2 review lessons in Lesson 60 of the Workbook of A Course In Miracles:
“4. (49) God’s Voice speaks to me all through the day.
²There is not a moment in which God’s Voice ceases to call on my forgiveness to save me. ³There is not a moment in which His Voice fails to direct my thoughts, guide my actions and lead my feet. ⁴I am walking steadily on toward truth. ⁵There is nowhere else I can go, because God’s Voice is the only Voice and the only Guide that has been given to His Son.
5. (50) I am sustained by the Love of God.
²As I listen to God’s Voice, I am sustained by His Love. ³As I open my eyes, His Love lights up the world for me to see. ⁴As I forgive, His Love reminds me that His Son is sinless. ⁵And as I look upon the world with the vision He has given me, I remember that I am His Son.”
(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 Saturday, March 1, 2026.)