This audio features CA Brooks and Bruce Rawles talking – on another segment of her weekly ACIM internet radio program on 12Radio – about the fourth essay “What is Sin” that appears in Part II of the Workbook of A Course in Miracles which precedes Workbook Lesson 251. This simple, yet profound summary distills how ego’s misinterpretation (of everything and everyone) makes all that seemed to happen in this dream of a world we take far too seriously appear irreconcilable, foisting the propaganda that attempts to justify sin’s companion mind thugs: guilt and fear. Our Inner Kindness Teacher, a.k.a. Holy Spirit, however, merely looks on ego’s quaintly perverse notion of sin as silly, forgivable and of no eternal consequence, letting everyone (including me and you) and everything ‘off the hook’ for a cosmic crime that was impossible to commit. The conversation also touched on a related section in ACIM’s text, Sin versus Error.
What Is Sin?
1. Sin is insanity. It is the means by which the mind is driven mad, and seeks to let illusions take the place of truth. And being mad, it sees illusions where the truth should be, and where it really is. Sin gave the body eyes, for what is there the sinless would behold? What need have they of sights or sounds or touch?What would they hear or reach to grasp? What would they sense at all? To sense is not to know. And truth can be but filled with knowledge, and with nothing else.
2. The body is the instrument the mind made in its efforts to deceive itself. Its purpose is to strive. Yet can the goal of striving change. And now the body serves a different aim for striving. What it seeks for now is chosen by the aim the mind has taken as replacement for the goal of self-deception. Truth can be its aim as well as lies. The senses then will seek instead for witnesses to what is true.
3. Sin is the home of all illusions, which but stand for things imagined, issuing from thoughts that are untrue. They are the “proof” that what has no reality is real. Sin “proves” God’s Son is evil; timelessness must have an end; eternal life must die. And God Himself has lost the Son He loves, with but corruption to complete Himself, His Will forever overcome by death, love slain by hate, and peace to be no more.
4. A madman’s dreams are frightening, and sin appears indeed to terrify. And yet what sin perceives is but a childish game. The Son of God may play he has become a body, prey to evil and to guilt, with but a little life that ends in death.But all the while his Father shines on him, and loves him with an everlasting Love which his pretenses cannot change at all.
5. How long, O Son of God, will you maintain the game of sin? Shall we not put away these sharp-edged children’s toys? How soon will you be ready to come home? Perhaps today? There is no sin. Creation is unchanged. Would you still hold return to Heaven back? How long, O holy Son of God, how long?