In this video conversation, we explore the ego’s intrinsic incompleteness and how the Holy Spirit helps us look honestly at how a separate identity will never content us; our True Identity forever calls us to return to complete and invulnerable fulfillment and unassailable wholeness. 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. In this video about A Course In Miracles, we started by talking about how ego is always incomplete and never has any capacity for completion, since it is a made-up thought system.
Our class read from “The Choice for Completion” (ACIM, T-16.V) – Here are the first 3 paragraphs of this section in the text:
“1. In looking at the special relationship, it is necessary first to realize that it involves a great amount of pain. ²Anxiety, despair, guilt and attack all enter into it, broken into by periods in which they seem to be gone. ³All these must be understood for what they are. ⁴Whatever form they take, they are always an attack on the self to make the other guilty. ⁵I have spoken of this before, but there are some aspects of what is really being attempted that have not been touched upon.
2. Very simply, the attempt to make guilty is always directed against God. ²For the ego would have you see Him, and Him alone, as guilty, leaving the Sonship open to attack and unprotected from it. ³The special love relationship is the ego’s chief weapon for keeping you from Heaven. ⁴It does not appear to be a weapon, but if you consider how you value it and why, you will realize what it must be.
3. The special love relationship is the ego’s most boasted gift, and one which has the most appeal to those unwilling to relinquish guilt. ²The “dynamics” of the ego are clearest here, for counting on the attraction of this offering, the fantasies that center around it are often quite overt. ³Here they are usually judged to be acceptable and even natural. ⁴No one considers it bizarre to love and hate together, and even those who believe that hate is sin merely feel guilty, but do not correct it. ⁵This is the “natural” condition of the separation, and those who learn that it is not natural at all seem to be the unnatural ones. ⁶For this world is the opposite of Heaven, being made to be its opposite, and everything here takes a direction exactly opposite of what is true. ⁷In Heaven, where the meaning of love is known, love is the same as union. ⁸Here, where the illusion of love is accepted in love’s place, love is perceived as separation and exclusion.”
“I have spoken of different symptoms, and at that level there is almost endless variation. ²There is, however, only one cause for all of them: the authority problem. ³This is “the root of all evil.” ⁴Every symptom the ego makes involves a contradiction in terms, because the mind is split between the ego and the Holy Spirit, so that whatever the ego makes is incomplete and contradictory. ⁵This untenable position is the result of the authority problem which, because it accepts the one inconceivable thought as its premise, can produce only ideas that are inconceivable.” (ACIM, T-3.VI.7:1-5)
“God is incomplete without you because His grandeur is total, and you cannot be missing from it.” (ACIM, T-9.VIII.9:8)
“The blind become accustomed to their world by their adjustments to it. ²They think they know their way about in it. ³They learned it, not through joyous lessons, but through the stern necessity of limits they believed they could not overcome. ⁴And still believing this, they hold those lessons dear, and cling to them because they cannot see. ⁵They do not understand the lessons keep them blind. ⁶This they do not believe. ⁷And so they keep the world they learned to “see” in their imagination, believing that their choice is that or nothing. ⁸They hate the world they learned through pain. ⁹And everything they think is in it serves to remind them that they are incomplete and bitterly deprived.” (ACIM, T-21.I.4:1-9)
“Such is the Holy Spirit’s kind perception of specialness; His use of what you made, to heal instead of harm. ²To each He gives a special function in salvation he alone can fill; a part for only him. ³Nor is the plan complete until he finds his special function, and fulfills the part assigned to him, to make himself complete within a world where incompletion rules.” (ACIM, T-25.VI.4:1-3)
“Behind the search for every idol lies the yearning for completion. ²Wholeness has no form because it is unlimited. ³To seek a special person or a thing to add to you to make yourself complete, can only mean that you believe some form is missing. ⁴And by finding this, you will achieve completion in a form you like. ⁵This is the purpose of an idol; that you will not look beyond it, to the source of the belief that you are incomplete. ⁶Only if you had sinned could this be so. ⁷For sin is the idea you are alone and separated off from what is whole.” (ACIM, T-30.III.3:1-7)
“God would not have Heaven incomplete. ⁶It waits for you, as I do. ⁷I am incomplete without your part in me.” (ACIM, W-rV.in.8:5-7)
Other words that appear in the primary section we reviewed are commitment (33 instances), satisfaction (14 instances), worthy (68 instances), worth (59 instances), partial (38 instances), impartial (38 instances), and idea (730 instances).
To provide a much-needed contrast to the insanity of ego’s dirge of incompletion, we closed the meeting with this inspiring selection from “The Gifts of God” Poems by Dr. Helen Schucman, Scribe of “A Course in Miracles.” – Foundation for Inner Peace:
“Our Gift to God
There is no gift of faith that God does not accept with gratitude. He loves His Son. And as He gives His gifts to him, so is He grateful for the gifts His Son gives Him. Gratitude is the song of Heaven’s gift, the single harmony that is sung by all creation at one with its Creator. For gratitude is love expressed in joining; the necessary precondition for extension and the prerequisite for peace. And who can be in conflict and love God?
We have discussed the gifts of God to you. Now we must also speak of those that you can give to Him. For these complete His giving, as it is His to you that make you whole. Giving is joy and holiness and healing. Here is your answer to the world, and God’s as well. For here it is you join with Him, His likeness being yours in this alone.
How can you give to Him Who has no lack, no emptiness, no need, no unlit place which needs a light that you can offer Him?
He saves your gifts for you. He does not know of giving and receiving. What is love, or comes from love, or offers love a gift, is one to Him because it is of Him. To Him and from Him are not different to One Who has no opposite. For love is all there is and everything there is. A gift to love is given everyone, not lessening the giver, nor in truth adding to the receiver. More than love there cannot be.
But this a gift becomes if it is truly given and received by both to both who know that they are one: A key to silence and the peace of God, a glad acknowledgment of love of Christ, a greeting to the Holy Spirit’s help, an invitation that He enter in and lift the Son of God unto Himself.”
(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 November 17, 2024.)
(Apologies for the technical issues – missing video and choppy audio – due to my internet connection, mostly in the first part of the recording.)
Here are some prior posts on ACIMblog.com that refer to the “Choice for Completion” section in the text of ACIM.
