8. What is the real world?

This section of takes the hand of those whom are ready, and gently steps beyond the world of hell, once so familiar and unquestioned and accepted as real, shedding it like lovers clothes, allowing trust to answer every question and eyes of forgiveness to rest upon all things…

This is a glorious time in the curriculum, for we are more identified with the truth, more comfortable with the happy dream as home than the antiquated script of fear, the competition for control, and death. Joyously I invite you into my every thought… The fantasy of private minds and special relationships have been replace by the compellingly appealing beauty of the face of Christ, our oneness, and the mighty chorus of love’s gratitude…

Each of the lessons in this section gives a touchstone in which to rest in the real world without resistance, re-membering our home in Heaven, Now…

Lesson 291:

This is a day of stillness and of peace…

This is the zero point ~ the touchstone. The place we begin and end our day. If we don’t start here, what can we expect? The goal belongs at the outset… We dump all thoughts that try to tell us what the day is about into the Holy Spirit’s hands and rest in stillness and peace… We need do nothing; we have released our agendas because trust is now our guide… Inspiration moves us to action, yet we remain still and peaceful within the center of our being... And what we do today we do joyously from this place of inner knowing that whatever it is, it is for the good of all…

Let’s launch this day, by joining in the lesson’s prayer:

“This day my mind is quiet, to receive the Thoughts You offer me. And I accept what comes from You, instead of from myself. I do not know the way to You. But You are wholly certain. Father, guide Your Son along the quiet path that leads to You. Let my forgiveness be complete, and let the memory of You return to me.”

LESSON 286:

The hush of Heaven holds my heart today…

“Father, how still today! How quietly do all things fall in place! This is the day that has been chosen as the time in which I come to understand the lesson that there is no need that I do anything. In You is every choice already made. In You has every conflict been resolved. In You is everything I hope to find already given me. Your peace is mine. My heart is quiet, and my mind at rest. Your Love is Heaven, and Your Love is mine…”

I need do nothing… This is an often used term with ACIM students. But do we really have more than mere concepts of what that means? This lesson speaks in harmony with the experience of peace that comes from accepting the Atonement for oneSelf… When we begin to see that what we thought was life, was the dream of death, and what we enjoyed as ‘special relationships’ were really the dream of exclusion and loneliness, we see also that all seeming problems are the same problem~ we think we that we have separated ourselves from our Source and therefore from each other and even split our own mind to attempt to identify with a false identity we made-up ourselves and simultaneously feel the power of the Atonement; that all falsehood has been given answer by the truth…

The peace and joy of Heaven are not far behind… With each forgiveness we offer, we feel the still peace the miracle blesses us with as we Christ’s face, which is our own, replace the ‘other’ with our love…

We were lost in the exile of denying the truth… but now, we deny the denial of truth and feel the hush of Heaven in the still belonging beneath the surface of the apparent reality which is being undone even as we forgive and bless…

What’s more, we are truly realizing the unified purpose of the Self we share. It is easier and easier to trust the ‘wholly certain goal’ and give our effort-ing to the Holy Spirit to use in behalf of the entire Sonship and the Atonement.

For just this instant, join me in breathing deeply into the hush of Heaven, already here, right now…

The hush of Heaven holds my heart today…

Lesson 202:

I am not a body. I am free.

For I am still as God created me.

I will be still an instant and go home.

I am not a body. I am free.

For I am still as God created me…

“There is a place in you where this whole world has been forgotten; where no memory of sin and of illusion lingers still. There is a place in your which time has left, and echoes of eternity are heard. There is a resting place so still no sound except a hymn to Heaven rises up to gladden God the father and the Son. Where Both abide are They remembered, Both. And where They ere is Heaven and is peace… Think not that you can change Their dwelling place. For your Identity abides in Them, and where They are, forever must you be. The changelessness of Heaven is in you, so deep within that nothing in this world but passes by, unnoticed and unseen. The still infinity of endless peace surrounds you gently in its soft embrace, so strong and quiet, tranquil in the might of it creator, nothing can intrude upon the sacred Son of God within.” (T-29.v.1-2).

Imagine that at any moment, you could just slip off into paradise of total peace and bliss.... You can. It’s called the present moment.

What this lesson is reminding us, is that we can experience this any time we choose. It’s saying, “How’s Now”?

It is a decision of the state in which we want to be. It is a wholehearted decision and can’t be made half-massed. We either want Heaven and the peace of God, or we want hell. In other words, what I am saying is that, if we are telling ourselves that we want Heaven yet don’t feel it is being given us, we are simply still harboring fugitive values in this world of hell. We are still valuing the belief that there is something outside our Self that can determine our experience of life. I like how the Course addresses this as a parallel to childish dreams. They make up characters and pretend the rule the world, and give their toys the power to move about, and talk and think and feel and speak for them. Yet everything their toys appear to do is in the minds of those who play with them. But they are eager to forget that they made up the dream in which their toys are real, nor recognize their whishes are their own, when in nightmares, it seems the toys have turned against the child who thought he made them real.

This is just how we do it, isn’t it? We experience said situation; say, you’re waiting at the amusement park, watching your child riding rides. It begins to pour rain. Those are simply the facts of the situation; the ‘innocent’ or neutral facts of the situation. It’s what is. Now, what if you don’t like it when this happens; what if you have a belief that rain will spoil the fun, or your hair, or you just plain don’t want it to rain, what happens? Does the rain back off? See, we give life (outside our self) to the object of our attention, with our judgment of it. Does our irritation change anything; but perhaps our sanity to insanity?

What if we remain in the present moment; totally, joyously accepting, without expectation, whatever happens?

This is the practice of ‘being still an instant and going home’. This is how we do our part in practicing the holy instant, till we have no more resistance left, and God can enter and the holy instant can be given us by God. For we are ready to receive…

Now, I am not talking about how we love certain things seemingly in this world, its only natural. We love what we make. Just as God loves what he created. We made the ego and with it a world opposite to Heaven in everyway (or it would be Heaven, wouldn’t it). So it must be a dream…

The thing is that we also cannot be apart from what we are; which is as God created, which is Heaven and home. We are the love we experience in this world. The joy and love and happiness we experience are infused by our being. Form has only the function we give it. It is our dream. We are at home in God.

I am not a body. I am free.

For I am still as God created me.

and

I will be still an instant and go home…

Lesson 155:

I will step back and let Him lead the way…

Illusions are exhausting. Trying to control, manipulate and organize them for happiness; to attempt to steer around the suffering and deprivation inherent in illusion is even more so. Yet what I have come to see is that this is just a track in mind that once on it, we are seemingly bound to its laws of deprivation and loss and fear. Yet, there is nothing real on this track. I am there only by my belief in its reality. This is maintained my defense of it and my allegiance to it. Still, it is merely a dream and by withdrawing my attention and belief from it I awaken to the truth within which realizes the clear and simple path before me leading directly home where all of me remains.

I don’t know if it’s a regular meditation practice, but definitely the committed desire to bring my so-called body-life (illusions) to the alter for purification and release, to be replaced by God-life instead, that I came to see that the world of form was but mere smoke and mirrors, dispelled by the mere desire for truth instead. This daily practice consecrated for the Holy Spirit’s use gave me a sense of the path where illusion-Danét steps back and He leads the way. Resistance is futile… joy abounds…The love of God and my oneness with Him is the true magnetic pull defining the purpose of my so-called life.

The lessons in this section are geared to show us that by letting our ideas slip behind, we find truth is not only our beacon, but that with it we beacon for others the way we must go. We walk to God. Right now this is an act of faith; a trust in His trust in us and a deep peace that we are indeed along the road to Him…

We rule our minds which we alone must rule. Love waits on welcome not on time and our sure-footed path leading certainly the way that we must go, wait on our welcome. Like the lesson says:

This is the simple choice we make today: to let illusions sink behind the truth and let the truth stand forth as what it is…

We walk to God. Pause and reflect on this. Could any way be holier, or more deserving of your effort, of your love and of your full intent? What way could give you more than everything, or offer less and still content the holy Son of God? We walk to God. The truth that walks before us now is one with Him, and leads us to where He has always been. What way but this could be a path that you would choose instead?

Joyously, filled with gratitude for you, I ask you join me in an eternal moment where we pause and reflect on this ….. breathing into it, letting the illusions of ourselves slip away, as we rest in God….

And as we move into our day this lesson guides our footsteps…

I will step back and let Him lead the way,
For I would walk along the road to Him.

Lesson 149:

My mind holds only what I think with God… When I am healed I am not healed alone… Heaven is the decision I must make…

I make is decision for Heaven now, always, and you are there with me. The decision for Heaven is the decision to be healed from our belief in hell as a possible choice.

In chapter 4 of the text, Jesus talks about our relationship with Heaven in a very real sense: “It is hard to understand what "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you" really means. This is because it is not understandable to the ego, which interprets it as if something outside is inside, and this does not mean anything. The word "within" is unnecessary. The Kingdom of Heaven you. What else you did the Creator create, and what else you is His Kingdom? This is the whole message of the Atonement; a message which in its totality transcends the sum of its parts.” (T-4.III.1-8)

This is why we are not healed alone. This is why when we accept the atonement for ourselves, which is another way of saying, “I decide for Heaven”; we accept healing, the only place where it can be found, for the whole Sonship. Only Salvation can be said to heal because all sickness has its beginning and end in the belief in separation, which is hell. All Healing must have at is core, then, one purpose. This unified purpose reacquaints us with our eternal oneness, which characterizes the mind that holds only what it thinks with God.

“The Kingdom is perfectly united and perfectly protected, and the ego will not prevail against it. Amen.” This is the prayer Jesus gives us to bring us back in touch with the truth of our being and the power of our united mind. Later in this same section of chapter 4 in the text, further clarification and assistance in dealing with the ego’s tempting persuasion is stated: “In your own mind, though denied by the ego, is the declaration of your release. This one fact means the ego does not exist, and this makes it profoundly afraid. In the ego's language, "to have" and "to be" are different, but they are identical to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit knows that you both everything and everything. Any distinction in this respect is meaningful only when the idea of "getting," which implies a lack, has already been accepted. That is why we make no distinction between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of God… The calm being of God's Kingdom, which in your sane mind is perfectly conscious, is ruthlessly banished from the part of the mind the ego rules. The ego is desperate because it opposes literally invincible odds, whether you are asleep or awake. Consider how much vigilance you have been willing to exert to protect your ego, and how little to protect your right mind. Who but the insane would undertake to believe what is not true, and then protect this belief at the cost of truth?” (T-4.III.9-10).

The logic the Course presents addresses so poignantly the absolute truth within; it is virtually irresistible to the mind that seeks the truth. I am constantly, profoundly moved by the simplicity of the Course’s message, as well as it ability to give my analyzing ego mind some compulsory intellectual satisfaction for which it show up and serves; (since ego is the vehicle I have to work with). After all, it is here (ego-belief-mind) where healing takes place, since Heaven is a state of pure wholeness. We make the decision for healing and for Heaven, and the Holy Spirit marshals all forces in Heaven and earth to realign our will with God’s, which of course is our Will as well, being only all that is.
I am overwhelmingly grateful to join allegiance to healing, together as one.

Lesson 138:

Heaven is the decision I must make…

Just a few years ago, when ‘my way’ came to its irrefutable end, I sat naked and empty~ free at last to be teachable... I visited this subject (Heaven is the decision I must make) with the sober heart and open mind that a student of as she sits at her master’s feet when ready at last to be the truth. Here’s how the inquiry went, for me…

“Heaven? ~I thought I made the choice for heaven long ago, yet now I see that I’ve been wrong. Tell me what Heaven is and what my choosing it is for… What does this mean? …

Heaven is a still, eternal, peaceful state of mind. Heaven is where Reality is. Heaven is being. It is knowledge. It is love. Heaven is synonymous with the Father and the Son. Heaven is the power of all creation as one. There is nowhere Heaven is not…

“If this be so, why is it a decision I must make, when choice is not its attribute? When one is everything one has everything. So where is choice perceived?”

Heaven is the decision one must make when one has forgotten the truth of Heaven itself; which is the truth of what we are.

I prayed out the fear-purge, “How is it that I know not who I am? How is it, too, that I have mistake myself for a tiny, guilty, fearful, sometimes happy, sometimes not, mass of carbon matter? How is it too, that, even in my private chamber, I am suspicious that perhaps there is a secret mole within my psyche, selling me out to the highest bidder, crumbling my structure of happiness, as soon I begin to feel its mine. How fragile is this carbon unit, requiring constant attention to stay fit; armed with intellect and muscle and cunning and skill, just to meet the requirement necessary when the games begin. And begin they must, for such are the dictates of the tyrannical leader~ king ego~ whose influence is the life/death basis of all the compulsory competing with the billion others, just like me…

“Where is Heaven? I know only of the obsession for acquisition of the secret, Holy Grail, which would reveal it to me. This priceless unknown magic that would make all this senseless searching, meaningless battling with an elusive enemy beyond my understanding, come to an end at last. And with it all the dirge of confusion, the elegy of contradictory ideas of happiness and redemption~ come at last to rest as sense upon my tired soul, restoring life eternal… to what I have made? “

This has been the illusion I cherished in place of Heaven. Why?

Simply this…

I would not truly look within; look and the look further still, look with Holy Spirit’s sight… I was afraid. I was wrong about my fears, but nonetheless, I stopped short of His help because of my lack of trust and my belief about myself. I thought I could not bear to look upon the darkness I feared would suck me into nothingness.

I would not look at my fear of God, for fear I would loose the image of a loving, forgiving God, I had designed to medicate my ever-pervasive guilt ~keep me one step ahead of myself till all the damage had been repaired… or some such bull which I believed.

I didn’t want to feel shitty… plain as day… I wanted to escape whatever hell I had gotten myself into, up to this point… and feel better now. Why couldn’t that be it?”

Ok, here’s the thing. This sophisticated; ego trap was designed to obliterate truth from ever approaching the single mind of the Son of God. So cunning and seductive are its methods to keep its own survival, it is deadly to underestimate its investment and power. This is why the Course speaks about the ego in personified terms. So we can see outside ourselves, the thought system we have subscribed to within our mind. Here’s the thing, too, (and its no small thing), this thought system has power equal only to the choice to believe it real.

Withdraw that belief ~ withdraw its power.

This cannot be done by avoidance… one cannot escape what one has made real in ones mind until it, in all its glory, has been placed on the table before us and seen for the fraud and boogie-man it is… Like today’s lesson says: “Heaven is chosen consciously. The choice cannot be made until alternatives are accurately seen and understood. All that is veiled in shadows must be raised to understanding, to be judged again, this time with Heaven's help. And all mistakes in judgment that the mind had made before are open to correction, as the truth dismisses them as causeless. Now are they without effects. They cannot be concealed, because their nothingness is recognized’.

Finally, it is the willingness to do this looking, fortified with the eternal safety that comes from opening to the Holy Spirit’s steady presence within mind, that allows one to make the one decision that must be made.

Heaven. ~It made all the difference…

The certainty that comes with total reliance on the Holy Spirit’s interpretation let me lean back and quit resisting… I realized the unknown as myself…

The Holy Spirit has a way of unrelentingly encouraging one ~ regardless of the seeming circumstances …

The Holy Spirit uses every defense against the truth, as a means of showing how it contradicts the very thing it purports to offer and instead perpetuates the seeming reality of the very thing defended against… And in the Now, simultaneously, the Holy Spirit begins awakening the mind to the alternative way of seeing things. Events become just events; situations, just situations; and circumstances are just circumstances… Personal identification with them begins to diminish.

A sense of generous understanding takes the place of specific persons and needs... The idea that one has been here before and it all worked out in the end… takes the place of anticipation and regret… And patience now becomes a steady pulse… of knowing that one can’t but be at the right place at the right time for everything to work together for good for all. Acceptance of a new meaning for time/space replaces the old as understanding unfolds what time is for… resistance makes no sense. Heaven is the decision I must make. I make it now, and will not change my mind, because it is the only thing I want…

Let’s make this indelible decision together today and let the comfort of our choice show Heaven’s meaning everywhere in everyone and encounter we have today… It is ours, after all…