In general, it is not a helpful place to be. If a text or teacher is helpful, then great. Make use of it. Share it. Learn from it. We can count on that. That is dependable. Finally, I note that the course teaches us early on that whatever meaning something has, we have given it that meaning e.
Whatever value we perceive in the world, be it positive or negative, we put it there. In Disappearance of the Universe , Arten and Pursah make the following observation with respect to their reality.
Our words can benefit people whether they have trust in us or not. This is a good point! And goes very much to the question of helpfulness.
By all means ask yourself whether Arten and Pursah are real. Look into it. Find the answer that works for you. But remember always that what informs your seeking and learning is love, and that the form love takes — be it Gary Renard and his ascended masters, Tara Singh and his service-oriented teaching, or Liz Cronkhite and her coach-based teaching model — will vary and shift, without ever diminishing the love that is the ground of our shared identity.
Living New Englandly. Homesteader, reader and writer. ACIM student. Love baking breads and pies. Don't mess with Emily Dickinson. I have been trying to follow ACIM as well as I can and I do feel as if I am coming from a very bad, a very low, place in starting , and Renard has been very helpful.
Also, he influenced me to check out Kenneth Wapnick. I will be checking on Liz Cronkhite soon. Thank you. I am glad I stumbled into this article.
I started to read The Disappearance of the Universe and I had an awkward moment learning about the existence or not of Arten and Pursah. And if this world were made by God, you would be a victim of God. You would be a victim of a force that was outside of you, that did it to you. But what if God has nothing to do with this? What if God is still perfect?
Well, we have to understand the implications of that, because if God is really perfect love, then all that It would know how to do would be to love. So God is still perfect. God is still perfect love, which is great, because it gives us a perfect home to go home to.
It disappears. And what it is replaced by is reality and reality is God, which is perfect oneness. In fact, The Course describes heaven as the awareness of perfect oneness, the knowledge that there is nothing else — nothing else outside of this oneness, nothing else within. And what you really are is exactly the same as your Source, exactly the same as God — no difference. So that narrows it down a little bit.
Gary: And what the Course is asking us to do is make a choice between those two things. The way that you get to actually experience that, instead of just having it as a theory, is that you see it everywhere, you see it in others. The reason that that works is because of the way that the mind works. A Course in Miracles understands how the mind works.
In that person you will either find yourself or lose yourself. You look out there you see all this separation, billions of bodies, trillions of objects, millions of things to choose between, and it looks like we have all this to choose between. And the truth is there are only two things to choose between and only one of them is real. They never understood that whatever they were thinking, even if it was subtle, whatever they were thinking or saying about another.
But not only that, but even ultimately what you believe you are. Now a great master like Jesus understood that, and he understood that the way to experience his divinity was to see it everywhere. So he thought of everybody as being completely innocent, no matter what images the ego showed him. He knew better. He knew reality. So what he would do is he would kind of overlook the body, which is just a symbol of separation, and think outside of the box.
He would think of everybody as being this perfect spirit — that is, not just part of it, but all of it. So A Course in Miracles goes all the way with this. And so to forgive anything that you see in this world is really to forgive yourself, and you will experience the benefits of that forgiveness. You know, people have no idea how good they could feel.
I mean they could feel so good it should be illegal. You can determine how you feel about yourself by changing the way that you think about other people and seeing innocence everywhere. Well for one thing, it feels special. It feels important to have an individual identity and a personal existence in a universe of time and space to play in, and to have all these accomplishments and goals, and possessions, and plans, and things.
It gives you a way out. It gives you a way home, which is something. And you start to look there and so the world is kind of losing its grip on you. Reminds me of something that Jesus said 2, years ago, which you can still see in the Gospel of Thomas. But the kingdom of heaven, which is our reality, is actually a higher life form — a higher life form than being human, so in order to experience it you have to be prepared for it. It really is more fun to be a butterfly than it is to be a caterpillar, and it really is more fun to be a spirit than it is to be a body.
And what The Course says is it prepares the mind to experience this reality in such a way that it would not be fearful, because it really is quite different than what we thought was reality. It can be experienced even while you appear to be here.
And when that happens. Because what happens is the body seems to disappear, and the universe of time and space seems to disappear. And in that experience is perfection, so there are no problems. I mentioned Saint Thomas Aquinas, he wrote something like 40 volumes worth of material. They simply have a mistaken idea of what they are. Eventually that experience of being separate and being a body and being human will be replaced with the experience of being what you really are and where you really are.
Rick: So Gary, I have a bunch of questions based on what you said so far and not sure where to start. But maybe one good one to start with was how you spoke of the importance of a thought system, being established from the perspective of cause rather than at the mercy of effect.
You speak a lot about thought — thought of this and thought of that. And I think sometimes people mistake understanding for the actual experience. But actually, if they could step into the shoes of those people and actually experience the world as they were experiencing it, they would find it to be radically different than a mere understanding.
So what would you say to that? Gary: That is so true and there is only one way to get from that idea of conceptual knowledge to actual experience, and that is practice. I ask people: do we really believe that we can attain the same level of spiritual mastery as people like Buddha and Jesus without practicing? If you keep anything at the level of theory, including A Course in Miracles , it will do you absolutely no good whatsoever.
It will get you nowhere; it will just be an entertainment. Gary: Exactly. So the way it works is something pushes your buttons, which happens to all of us occasionally. Or I can stop myself; I catch myself and switch to thinking with the Holy Spirit in the mind instead of the ego in the mind. That involves an active choice, which is why A Course in Miracles is proactive. It involves an actual conscious decision on your part to stop thinking with the ego, and start thinking with the Holy Spirit.
You gotta take care of it. These people are a problem. I mean it would take less time to just forgive the bastards. In other words, his whole orientation to the world was radically different. His moment to moment perception of the world and of himself was radically different. Gary: Absolutely. It leads to that experience of love naturally because it undoes the part of the mind that is not love.
This is about undoing the ego. And by forgiving that and doing your part of the job, which The Course teaches is actually pretty small. The Course says that a miracle is never lost. So every time you practice forgiveness, the Holy Spirit is taking that forgiveness and shining it all through the universe of time and space [and] any parallel universes that exist.
Is that correct? You can have brilliant ideas. You can have genius-level ideas that you never would have thought of if you were thinking with the ego and reacting and coming from a place of effect. The truth is buried there in the mind.
Think of that as being the Holy Spirit — the truth that is in your mind that is speaking to you. Rick: And how do we know when the Holy Spirit is speaking to us and not some individual impulse that we want to indulge in?
Gary: I think the answer to that question is simpler than we want to realize, because that voice that you hear is talking about love and forgiveness and great things. So you learn to kind of overlook the body. Rick: I was going to ask you about that. At a certain point people started getting fed up with that. He was confronted by a rogue elephant who was about to trample him and he quickly scampered up a tree. Gary: He brought up a couple of big topics.
The first one is that teaching that the world is an illusion is of very limited value. And what A Course in Miracles does is it replaces the illusion with something else.
Now, because The Course is done at the level of the mind and not at the level of the world, you can practice it at the level of the mind. And because your thoughts determine your experience, you can have these spiritual thoughts at the level of the mind and you can have your life too. You can have your life. One of the ten characteristics of a teacher of God is joy. This is the wisdom teacher who existed 2, years ago, who simply pointed people in the right direction.
Gary: No, just the opposite. There is this unconscious guilt that can be traced back to the original idea of being separate from God, which engendered a deep ontological guilt in the mind that people are not aware of. But as you practice this kind of forgiveness that is being healed, and with less guilt in your mind you actually end up enjoying life more. One of the great teachers of A Course in Miracles , probably the greatest teacher of A Course in Miracles , Ken Wapnick, who made his transition about a year and a half ago, he loved classical music.
And at the end of his life he loved it even more than ever. You can be more successful. Gary: You have less guilt in your mind because that guilt is actually being literally removed from your mind by the Holy Spirit. As you do that, the Holy Spirit, according to The Course, is actually healing the mind, actually removing this unconscious guilt from your mind.
You actually start to gradually shift your experience from the experience of being a body to the experience of being spirit. I mentioned that The Course uses words a little differently than most people. It would persuade the holy son of God is a body, born in what must die, unable to escape its frailty, and bound by what it orders him to feel.
People think that they have pain in their knee. You can start to get domination over the body. Rick: Well pain can be a useful function. If I put my hand on a stove I want to feel pain because I want to know my hand is on the stove and take it away again. Rick: Do you distinguish between pain and suffering? Rick: Really? What do you think he would experience? What do you think he did experience when they were driving spikes through his wrists? And his experience was his perfect oneness with God.
So when they drove those nails into his wrists he felt no pain whatsoever. The body to him was like a figure in a dream. Gary: If somebody drove a nail through my wrist it would hurt but not as much as it would have 20 years ago.
Back then I was still making it real, even though I had been on the spiritual path for 14 years at that time. It was still real to me, I still thought it was very important, I still suffered.
I mentioned as you go along your experience will change. Maybe your body will start to feel lighter, maybe it will start to feel more like the figure in a dream that it really is, instead of this thing that you have to carry around! Maybe it will be more difficult to hurt it, maybe it will be more flexible. So it really is possible to shift your identity, to shift your experience to the experience of being spirit.
Now the good news is you could still have your life, you could still have everything. We love to go out to dinner and I like to have a couple of glasses of wine and we like to have a good time. We like our travelling and our speaking. Rick: You mentioned this traffic incident as an opportunity for practicing forgiveness — a typical thing that happens to people…getting cut off in traffic.
It says that anger is never justified, which is a pretty tall standard. Rick: It is and I heard that. Gary: Right. It actually releases it. A fine qualification for a student, another one being the desire to learn In helping you we will not be giving you the so-called wisdom of the ages that your contemporary spiritual wizards are so fond of.
You will learn instead that most of what the world thinks of as the wisdom of the ages is actually full of it. You will learn that babies are not born with a clean slate or a natural tendency to focus on love and are then corrupted by the world, and you will find that if you are to return to God then you have some work to do — not work in the world, but with your thoughts.
During most of this it will appear to you that we are making judgments, a lot of them. His judgment is sound, and leads to God. Your judgment is poor, and leads you back here, again and again. PURSAH: During our exchanges you will also find out what you really are, how you got here, exactly why you and all other people behave and feel the way that you do, why the universe keeps repeating the same patterns over and over again, why people get sick, the reason behind all failure, accidents, addictions and natural disasters, the real cause of all of the violence, crime, war and terrorism in the world, the only meaningful solution to all of these things and how to apply it.
GARY: If you can tell me all that, you win a prize. GARY: Heaven? You have heard that the truth shall set you free. You have heard that the Kingdom of Heaven is within you. That is also true, but nobody tells you how to get there. If they did, would you listen? We will point you toward the water, but you will only drink it if you are ready for a spirituality that, like the truth, is not of this universe. One of the fundamental differences between the teachings of J and the teachings of the world is this: The teachings of the world are the product of a split, unconscious mind.
Once you have that you have compromise, and once you have compromise you no longer have the truth. You will not find compromise with us, and you will not always like it.
There is something much better to feel good about. Our intention now is to help you find yours After a year and four months of almost constant dedication and attention, I managed to complete all of the Workbook Lessons.
Both are necessary to understand and apply the Course; neither is complete without the other. The Workbook, however, has a more practical feature to it. For me, there were also the occasional and welcome experiences of peace that were present, instead of my usual and habitual upsets.
That alone was enough to make me thankful for the direction my life had taken By August, I was very excited because eight months had gone by since I had last seen Arten and Pursah. By now I trusted them to keep their word and appear to me again at the end of that interval.
GARY: Just joking. Arten is actually here, too. An ascended master is everywhere. Sometimes we interact with someone or do something somewhere that will help facilitate forgiveness in that particular dimension.
When you forgive in one lifetime, you help the Holy Spirit heal all of them. Arten will show up with me again next visit. This time, just focus on talking with me. I want you to be even better at it, O. For most people, that kind of help is absolutely necessary. The Workbook has helped you tremendously. Some people do the exercises in the Workbook twice; some people do them every year.
In your case, just reading and applying the Workbook ideas the same way you do with the ideas in the Text and the Manual will be enough from now on. The Course teaches that your sole responsibility is to accept the Atonement for yourself.
Having completed the Workbook, you finally understand that whenever you condemn another, your salvation is off to a flying stop. GARY: We had a guest at our study group meeting a couple of weeks ago when somebody mentioned something about the world being an illusion, and this guy was really pissed.
The point is that you have to learn how to forgive in order to get home. Understanding the metaphysics of the Course is required in order to understand forgiveness, but it may be helpful to some people if you stress forgiveness first, then bring in the dreamlike nature of the world and other features of the truth gradually. That means people will only stay with it if they hear something that rings true for them, or piques their interest. Just be yourself and let the Holy Spirit work with people.
Just forgive — silently. Tell me something you remember from the Workbook; anything that comes to mind — quickly. GARY: O. This is one of my favorites.
The ego holds the body dear because it dwells in it, and lives united with the home that it has made. It is a part of the illusion that has sheltered it from being found illusory itself. ACIM: W Now, if you thought you were a body before you had the Course, then you can be certain other people definitely think they are bodies.
An important component of your forgiveness is that you want to teach people, silently, that they are not bodies. As the Course puts it,. As we go along, try to remember that. As a musician, I had known quite a few people who engaged in an unusually large amount of sexual behavior and were still miserable. Sex was a very transitory experience.
If someone seemed content, it was because they had some kind of internal happiness that was not ultimately dependent on temporary gratification. There was no judgment made about behavior. The only question was: Does the student want to have the body or spirit for an identity?
To insist on celibacy for yourself or anyone else would be a judgment rather than forgiveness, yet it would be perfectly appropriate for someone to choose celibacy if they wanted to.
Not having the body as their identity simply meant that at some point students should remember who they and their partners really were. For those in love, sex could be used as a symbol of joining and an expression of their love. The key was an awareness — even if that awareness was temporarily forgotten in the heat of the moment — that their partner was not really a body but Christ.
In turn, how they thought of the other person is what established their own identity in their mind. ACIM: T A powerful advantage of A Course in Miracles is that instead of merely telling you to believe you are not a body, it actually gives you the means to experience something beyond — and better. Most people have no idea of how good they could really feel.
A chief goal of the Course is to lead the student to an Identity, and associated experiences, that are not of this world. Most people would hesitate to give up the world, but would they be so hesitant if they were given a clear taste of the alternative? All experiences, including sex, are mental states — even if the illusion is that they take place in the body.
I remember visiting a church in Boston to hear a lecture by two Buddhist monks who grew up near the border of India and Tibet. After the lecture, people in the audience were given the opportunity to ask questions. Then one woman had the courage to get up and ask the monks how they could go so long — in one case, thirty years — without having sex. What the Holy Spirit offered was constant, compared to the precarious and unreliable experience of each seemingly separated mind.
The eternal Word of God could not really become temporary flesh, except in unreal dreams, but the flesh could be brought to the truth. GARY: Hey guys. Thanks for coming. Since sex is part of what you call life, and since we already know you want to talk about it, where would you like to begin? A dream is nothing, and sex is nothing. For example, the Course says very early on,. Fantasies are a means of making false associations and attempting to obtain pleasure from them.
But although you can perceive false associations, you can never make them real except to yourself. You believe in what you make. If you offer miracles, you will be equally strong in your belief in them. Let not their form deceive you.
Idols are but substitutes for your reality. In some way, you believe they will complete your little self, for safety in a world perceived as dangerous, with forces massed against your confidence and peace of mind.
They have the power to supply your lacks, and add the value that you do not have. No one believes in idols who has not enslaved himself to littleness and loss. And thus must seek beyond his little self for strength to raise his head, and stand apart from all the misery the world reflects. This is the penalty for looking not within for certainty and quiet calm that liberates you from the world, and lets you stand apart, in quiet and in peace.
It merely puts you in a position where you can claim your natural inheritance, which is far greater than any bodily feeling you can conjure up. GARY: Nope. She went to New Hampshire to do some shopping with her mother. GARY: Funny. You know I was telling her a few weeks ago about when I was a teenager and I went to a dance at a Catholic church hall.
I was dancing a slow dance, really close to this girl. Telling people to repress their unconscious, pre-programmed desires is like telling a bird not to fly. Do you remember that self-righteous minister at the Baptist church when you were in high school, who used to speak out against the evils of sex — all the while he was going after half the women in the congregation?
GARY: Oh, yeah! GARY: Not very. Then Pope Gregory, who had no sense of humor, insisted on all priests being celibate — even the ones who at that time were married! GARY: Ah, nothing? So for the last plus years, priests have had to be celibate. The illusory universe is a place of tension and release. You see it all through what you call nature. You even find it in music. It is not natural to make someone give up certain kinds of behavior until they themselves are completely ready to, nor in the case of most priests is it necessary anyway.
GARY: Excuse me? Only because of your warped view of history, along with centuries of projection of unconscious sin and guilt onto sex, do you now see the idea of J being celibate as a necessity. Somebody else might. The whole idea about sex being a bad thing never came from God and it never came from J. They are both normal activities for a body, and any idea to the contrary is completely made up by people, not spiritually inspired. September 11, When Arten and Pursah had first appeared to me nine years earlier I was at war.
Now I was at peace most of the time and the United States was at war. On this day the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and four commercial passenger airliners became the targets of terrorists, destroying all the targets except for the Pentagon, which was heavily damaged.
Thousands of unarmed civilians were murdered and the American people, except for a very small minority, were in no frame of mind for any kind of forgiveness. This was a new kind of war for a more complex world. That Tuesday morning, along with millions of others, I stared in numbed silence as the live pictures on my television screen showed the second tower of the World Trade Center collapsing.
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