In this video recording of a class given as part of the School For A Course In Miracles (SFACIM) curriculum led by Lyn Corona and Tim Wise, Bruce Rawles reads and discusses a favorite lesson from A Course In Miracles, Workbook Lesson 182: “I will be still an instant and go home.” – W-pI.182. The tone of this workbook lesson is reminiscent of that used in The Forgotten Song in Chapter 21.
Here’s a related quote from the text of ACIM:
“You have built your whole insane belief system because you think you would be helpless in God’s Presence, and you would save yourself from His Love because you think it would crush you into nothingness. You are afraid it would sweep you away from yourself and make you little, because you believe that magnitude lies in defiance, and that attack is grandeur. You think you have made a world God would destroy; and by loving Him, which you do, you would throw this world away, which you would. Therefore, you have used the world to cover your love, and the deeper you go into the blackness of the ego’s foundation, the closer you come to the Love that is hidden there. And it is this that frightens you.” (ACIM, T-13.III.4) (Boldface added by Bruce for emphasis.)
Charles C. Finn wrote a poem in 1966 entitled Please Hear What I’m Not Saying that resonates with the open-minded willingness to bring all our secret shame and guarded guilt to Holy Spirit for transformation. The poem – with a timely theme of inner un-masking that seems particularly relevant now in a time of global pandemic while external masks are now commonplace, begins with the line “Don’t be fooled by me.”
Here’s a related video by Kenneth Wapnick, talking about how we typically don’t begin the spiritual search in earnest until we’ve gone beyond mid-life: “It really is our sense of dissatisfaction – our sense of hopelessness, despair, pain, that drives us to really seek a different answer” – Ken Wapnick Understanding the mind_Excerpt from “A Course in Miracles” Workshop
Here are a few excerpted quotes from Ken from an audio recording about this particularly lovely lesson:
“Nothing here is important and of value, because nothing is here at all.”
“Anyone who believes that he or she is here in a body, somewhere deep inside knows that they don’t belong here, and the anxiety and the terror and the despair come from recognizing that they do not know how to get home. They only know that this is not home, but they don’t know where they should return. … The despair comes from realizing that they are then reduced … to making the best of what is already a perfectly miserable situation, namely being here in the body. … Somewhere we made a wrong turn and ended up in this body.”
“There will be so many people – including students of the Course – who will say, I don’t know what all this means. I’ve very happy here. Everything is wonderful here. Jesus is saying that somewhere (in your mind) you know that this is true. Please don’t try to pretend, because if you continue to pretend that you’re happy here or that there’s hope of happiness here, I can never lead you home – because you’ll think you are at home, then you’ll try to drag me into your home and make it better for you.”
“Yet some try to put by their suffering in games they play to occupy their time, and keep their sadness from them.” W.pI.182.2:2
Ken’s response: “These would be everyone who indulges in special relationships. … We try to hide the pain of our guilt and self-hatred by the games of specialness in which we try to pretend that there’s someone or something outside of us that can bring us happiness and bring us peace and even bring us to God.”“Others will deny that they are sad, and do not recognize their tears at all.” W.pI.182.2:3
Ken: “These … are the bliss-ninnies. ‘Everything is wonderful. Jesus loves us so much he sent us this course so that we could be happy here with him.’ These are the ones that are the most difficult for Jesus to help, because they don’t believe that they need help. The help that we truly need is to realize that this is a dream, so we could understand why we made up the dream, which then would be the way … to forgive ourselves for having done so, and that’s what will help us awaken from the dream and return to our Source.”“Still others will maintain that what we speak of is illusion, not to be considered more than but a dream.” W.pI.182.2:4
Ken: “These would be the ones who would say ’Jesus doesn’t mean this.” (God didn’t make the “bad stuff” in the world.)
“This world is not our home at all in any way, shape or form, and to try to pretend that is, or to try to make it a better place will simply reinforce the ego strategy of keeping us from our minds.”Yet who, in simple honesty, without defensiveness and self-deception, would deny he understands the words we speak?” W.pI.182.2:5
Ken: “Somewhere inside of you, you know what I’m telling you is true. This, I think basically is the attraction that drew everyone to the Course in the first place, whether they understood it or not. They realized there was something in here that was true, another else they had ever seen or heard of was true. … but this was. … Then the fear sets in and they become terrified of that Truth, and that’s when they try to compromise and turn it around and make into something which is comfortable. … You wouldn’t have to deny what the Course was saying if you first didn’t realize what it’s saying is true.”“A thousand homes he makes, yet none contents his restless mind.” W.pI.182.3:3
(all the different forms of specialness; relationships, substances, things, conditions, situations, bodily regimens, finances, etc.)“The childhood of your body, and its place of shelter, are a memory now so distorted that you merely hold a picture of a past that never happened.” – W.pI.182.4:2
Ken: “He’s talking about people who idealize their past, and the reason for idealizing their past is to prove how miserable people have been to you in your present. ‘Things were wonderful when I was a child but things are terrible now.’ For most people, if they were honest, they would that things were not all that wonderful when they were children either.”
The second part of this lesson alludes to the beginning of our spiritual journey; we’re all children metaphorically.
Ken: “We are the ones who are starting out on our journey as little children.”
(Jesus is leading us to the real world by way of steps – holy instants growing in frequency.)
Ken: “The whole purpose of this Course is for us to have us become so uncomfortable with the disparity between our experienced self here and our True Self (with a capital S) whose memory is in our Minds that we would then be motivated to say ‘There must be another way of living and perceiving.’ What will allow us to choose Jesus as our Teacher is our growing discomfort with how we are experiencing our lives here. Without that discomfort, there would be no motivation, because you won’t believe you need a teacher. His purpose is not that we suffer … the purpose is (for us to realize) that we are already suffering, and he wants us to become aware of it so that we will be motivated to seek the way out with the right Teacher.” (Boldface added by Bruce for emphasis.)
Perhaps Jesus is the metaphoric sand in our mental oyster that produces the pearl of wisdom?
The psychological term for this is cognitive dissonance.
Wikipedia: “In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance occurs when a person holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values; or participates in an action that goes against one of these three, and experiences psychological stress because of that.”In space, when you put two objects in an optical illusion side by side, it becomes obvious that they are the same when not so when they appear apart. Reference: Ebbinghaus Illusion
In time, when you slowly raise the temperature on a pot of water, the frogs might not jump out until too late when they are already being boiled.
“Jesus calls to us from eternity to the place in our mind beyond time where we have always been – in a state of peace so profound we would leap into heaven if we knew how miserable we’ve made ourselves by believing in the maladaptive solution to the non-existent problem.”
We have an infinitely loving parent that wants us to know we’re home and to experience that, but first, we have to admit that we’re lost in a dream we don’t even remember making up.
“The goal of the Course could never be to be happy here.”
(This recording was made July 22, 2020.)