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 reading Lesson 258:
Let me remember that my goal is God.
1. All that is needful is to train our minds to overlook all little senseless aims, and to remember that our goal is God. ²His memory is hidden in our minds, obscured but by our pointless little goals which offer nothing, and do not exist. ³Shall we continue to allow God’s grace to shine in unawareness, while the toys and trinkets of the world are sought instead? ⁴God is our only goal, our only Love. ⁵We have no aim but to remember Him.
2. Our goal is but to follow in the way that leads to You. ²We have no goal but this. ³What could we want but to remember You? ⁴What could we seek but our Identity?
There are 160 instances of “Holy Instant” (or paragraphs that have both of those words) in ACIM. We have a holy instant each time we truly forgive – a momentary glimmer of the unchanging light that is the eternal Holy Instant. We suspend our condemning ego thoughts and the peace that awaits us is restored to our minds, motivating us to choose Holy Spirit’s real alternative more often.
Other words that appear in the primary section we reviewed are commitment (33 instances), satisfaction (14 instances), worthy (68 instances), worth (59 instances), and idea (730 instances).
Now for some comments on a few of the lines in featured reading…
“Under the Holy Spirit’s teaching all relationships are seen as total commitments, yet they do not conflict with one another in any way.” (ACIM, T-15.VI.1:3)
We can’t completely commit ourselves (our identity) to ego, because it is nothing and borrows (steals) it’s identity from reality … There is no conflict between total commitment(s) with every part of the Sonship in pure non-duality, but conflict is unavoidable in any form of duality.
“You do not ask too much of life, but far too little. When you let your mind be drawn to bodily concerns, to things you buy, to eminence as valued by the world, you ask for sorrow, not for happiness. This course does not attempt to take from you the little that you have. It does not try to substitute utopian ideas for satisfactions which the world contains. There are no satisfactions in the world.” (ACIM, W-133.2:1-5)
Fortunately, if (when) we decide to totally commit to Holy Spirit’s forgiveness program, we are guaranteed 100% satisfaction. (This is actually total fulfillment of Spirit recognizing itself as all-inclusive and needing nothing from dualistic dreams, and has nothing to do with what the world calls satisfaction… of course!)
“… make a brother into what he is not…” (ACIM, T-15.VI.1:6) We’re all one SUBJECT in pure non-duality; there is no OBJECT, so when we try to make (subject) “another” to ego’s whims, we make objectionable objects in our mind and have to project them, a very unsatisfying and lonely situation which only dreams can support!
The double shield of oblivion disappears in the Holy Instant as we accept Holy Sprit’s correction for the tiny mad idea: “In the holy instant nothing happens that has not always been. ²Only the veil that has been drawn across reality is lifted.” (ACIM, T-15.VI.6:1-2)“No one who has not yet experienced the lifting of the veil, and felt himself drawn irresistibly into the light behind it, can have faith in love without fear.” (ACIM, T-15.VI.6:5) … “Truth has rushed to meet you since you called upon it. ²If you knew Who walks beside you on the way that you have chosen, fear would be impossible. ³You do not know because the journey into darkness has been long and cruel, and you have gone deep into it. ⁴A little flicker of your eyelids, closed so long, has not yet been sufficient to give you confidence in yourself, so long despised. ⁵You go toward love still hating it, and terribly afraid of its judgment upon you. ⁶And you do not realize that you are not afraid of love, but only of what you have made of it. ⁷You are advancing to love’s meaning, and away from all illusions in which you have surrounded it. ⁸When you retreat to the illusion your fear increases, for there is little doubt that what you think it means is fearful. ⁹Yet what is that to us who travel surely and very swiftly away from fear?” (ACIM, T-18.III.3:1-9)
To prepare for the main reading, we explored the idea of quietly watching the insanity of the ego until we no longer take it seriously:
“Can you imagine what it means to have no cares, no worries, no anxieties, but merely to be perfectly calm and quiet all the time? Yet that is what time is for; to learn just that and nothing more. God’s Teacher cannot be satisfied with His teaching until it constitutes all your learning. He has not fulfilled His teaching function until you have become such a consistent learner that you learn only of Him. When this has happened, you will no longer need a teacher or time in which to learn.” (ACIM, T-15.I.1:1-5)
(We did something unusual in this session for the main reading; we read each sentence twice to allow the meaning to sink in more deeply.)
Then we read and talked about the “The Holy Instant and the Laws of God” (ACIM, T-15.VI) Here are the first three paragraphs of this section:
“1. It is impossible to use one relationship at the expense of another and not to suffer guilt. ²And it is equally impossible to condemn part of a relationship and find peace within it. ³Under the Holy Spirit’s teaching all relationships are seen as total commitments, yet they do not conflict with one another in any way. ⁴Perfect faith in each one, for its ability to satisfy you completely, arises only from perfect faith in yourself. ⁵And this you cannot have while guilt remains. ⁶And there will be guilt as long as you accept the possibility, and cherish it, that you can make a brother into what he is not, because you would have him so.
2. You have so little faith in yourself because you are unwilling to accept the fact that perfect love is in you. ²And so you seek without for what you cannot find without. ³I offer you my perfect faith in you, in place of all your doubts. ⁴But forget not that my faith must be as perfect in all your brothers as it is in you, or it would be a limited gift to you. ⁵In the holy instant we share our faith in God’s Son because we recognize, together, that he is wholly worthy of it, and in our appreciation of his worth we cannot doubt his holiness. ⁶And so we love him.
3. All separation vanishes as holiness is shared. ²For holiness is power, and by sharing it, it gains in strength. ³If you seek for satisfaction in gratifying your needs as you perceive them, you must believe that strength comes from another, and what you gain he loses. ⁴Someone must always lose if you perceive yourself as weak. ⁵Yet there is another interpretation of relationships that transcends the concept of loss of power completely.”
“Truth has rushed to meet you since you called upon it. ²If you knew Who walks beside you on the way that you have chosen, fear would be impossible. ³You do not know because the journey into darkness has been long and cruel, and you have gone deep into it. ⁴A little flicker of your eyelids, closed so long, has not yet been sufficient to give you confidence in yourself, so long despised. ⁵You go toward love still hating it, and terribly afraid of its judgment upon you. ⁶And you do not realize that you are not afraid of love, but only of what you have made of it. ⁷You are advancing to love’s meaning, and away from all illusions in which you have surrounded it. ⁸When you retreat to the illusion your fear increases, for there is little doubt that what you think it means is fearful. ⁹Yet what is that to us who travel surely and very swiftly away from fear? ” (ACIM, T-18.III.3:1-9)“It is this one intent we seek today, uniting our desires with the need of every heart, the call of every mind, the hope that lies beyond despair, the love attack would hide, the brotherhood that hate has sought to sever, but which still remains as God created it. ²With Help like this beside us, can we fail today as we request the peace of God be given us?” (ACIM, W-185.14:1-2)
Let me remember that there is no sin.
1. Sin is the only thought that makes the goal of God seem unattainable. ²What else could blind us to the obvious, and make the strange and the distorted seem more clear? ³What else but sin engenders our attacks? ⁴What else but sin could be the source of guilt, demanding punishment and suffering? ⁵And what but sin could be the source of fear, obscuring God’s creation; giving love the attributes of fear and of attack?
2. Father, I would not be insane today. ²I would not be afraid of love, nor seek for refuge in its opposite. ³For love can have no opposite. ⁴You are the Source of everything there is. ⁵And everything that is remains with You, and You with it.
(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 September 15, 2024.)
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