What Is A Course In Miracles
History of A course in miracles:
A Course in Miracles began with the unexpected choice of two people to join in a mutual goal. Their names were William Thetford and Helen Schucman, Professors of Medical Psychology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. They were everything but spiritual. Their connection with each other was tough and often tense, and they were worried about professional and personal status and acceptance. In Overall, they had a significant outlay in the values of the world.
Over the previous 34 years, David Hoffmeister has traveled to 44 countries across 6 continents to spread the message that reality is available for everybody. His experiences that are founded on A Course in Miracles have been translated into 13 languages and engaged into the hearts and minds of millions through the friendly style of his books, audios, and videos.
What is ACIM:
ACIM makes a fundamental difference between the unreal and the real; between perception and fact. Knowledge is truth, under one law, the law of love or God. Truth is unchangeable, everlasting, and unmistakable. It can be unrecognized, but it cannot be changed. It applies to all that God created, and only what He created is real. It is past learning since it is beyond time and process. It has no contrary; no beginning and no end. It purely is.
The world of perception, on the other hand, is the world of time, of revolution, of development and conclusions. It is based on belief, not on evidence of Spirit. It is the world of birth and death, founded on the belief in scarcity, loss, separation, and death. It is learned rather than given, selective in its perceptual importance, inaccurate in its interpretations, and unstable in its functioning.
From facts and insight respectively, two separate thought systems ascend which are contrary in every respect. In the empire of knowledge, no opinions exist apart from God, as God and His Creation share one Will. The world of insight, however, is made by the acceptance in opposites and distinct wills, in a perpetual battle with one another and with God. What insight hears and sees appears to be actual because it allows into mindfulness only what conforms to the desires of the perceiver. This leads to a world of delusions, a world that needs continuous defense because it is not real.
When you have been wedged in the world of awareness you are trapped in a dream. You cannot escape without aid, because all your senses show only witnesses to the genuineness of the dream. God has provided the Answer, the only Way out, the true Helper. It is the purpose of His Voice, His Holy Spirit, to facilitate amongst the two worlds. He can do this for, while on the one hand, He knows the truth, on the other He also knows our delusions, but without believing in them. It is the Holy Spirit’s goal to support us escape from the dream world by coaching us on how to inverse our thinking and unlearn our faults. Mercy is the Holy Spirit’s great learning aid in carrying this thought reversal about. However, the Course has its own definition of what forgiveness really is just as it describes the world in its own way.
The world we see only reflects our own inner frame of reference-the leading ideas, wishes, and feelings in our thoughts. We look inside first, choose the kind of world we want to see, and then plan that world outside, making it the reality as we see it. We make it right by our understandings of what it is we are seeing. If we are using awareness to defend our own mistakes-our anger, our desires to attack, our absence of love in whatsoever form it may take-we will see a world of sinful, destruction, hatred, jealousy, and anguish. All this we must absorb to forgive, not as we are being “decent” and “generous,” but because what we are seeing is not accurate. We have distorted the world by our bitter defenses, and are consequently seeing what is not around. As we learn to recognize our perceptual mistakes, we also learn to look past them or “forgive.” At the same time, we are forbearing ourselves, looking past our partial self-concepts to the Self That God created in us and as us.
Sin is defined as the “absence of love”. Meanwhile, love is all there is, sin in the vision of the Holy Spirit is a fault to be corrected, rather than an evil to be penalized. Our intellect of insufficiency, softness, and incompletion comes from the sturdy investment in the “scarcity principle” that rules the entire world of delusions. From that point of view, we hunt for in others what we sense is inadequate in ourselves. We “love” another in order to get something ourselves. That, in fact, is what passes for love in the reverie world. There can be no larger mistake than that, for love is incapable of asking for everything.
Only minds can really unite, and whom God has united no man can put apart. It is, however, only at the level of Christ Mind that true union is possible, and has, in fact, never been missing. The “little I” seeks to develop itself by external consent, external belongings, and peripheral “love.” The Self That God created needs nothing. It is continually complete, harmless, loved, and loving. It seeks to share rather than to get; to extend rather than a project. It has no needs and wants to join with others out of their shared awareness of wealth.
The superior relationships of the world are critical, self-centered, and immaturely egocentric. Yet, if given to the Holy Spirit, these relationships can convert the holiest things on earth-the miracles that point the way to the return to Heaven. The world uses its special relationships as an ultimate weapon of exclusion and a demonstration of separateness. The Holy Spirit converts them into flawless lessons in mercy and in arising from the dream. Each one is a chance to let insights be cured and mistakes corrected. Each one is another chance to forgive oneself by forgiving the other. And each one becomes still another invitation to the Holy Spirit and to the remembrance of God.
Awareness is a function of the body, and consequently denotes a limit on mindfulness. Insight sees through the body’s eyes and hears through the body’s ears. It arouses the partial responses which the body makes. The body appears to be mostly self-motivated and self-governing, yet it truly answers only to the goals of the mind. If the mind wants to use it for the attack in any form, it becomes victim to illness, age, and decline. If the mind admits the Holy Spirit’s purpose for it as an alternative, it turns into a useful way of collaborating with others, safe as long as it is required, and to be gently left by when its use is over. In itself, it is impartial, as is everything in the world of perception. Whether it is used for the goals of the character or the Holy Spirit rests entirely on what the mind wishes.
The opposite of seeing through the body’s eyes is the idea of Christ, which reflects forte rather than weakness, harmony rather than separation, and love rather than terror. The opposite of hearing through the body’s ears is communication through the Voice for God, the Holy Spirit, which stands in each of us. His Voice appears distant and hard to hear as the ego, which expresses for the little, separated self, seems to be much louder. This is actually inverted. The Holy Spirit speaks with distinctive simplicity and irresistible appeal. No one who does not choose to recognize with the body could perhaps be deaf to His messages of release and courage, nor could he fail to take joyously the vision of Christ in willing exchange for his miserable image of himself.
Christ’s vision is the Holy Spirit’s gift, God’s substitute to the deception of separation and to the trust in the truth of sin, guilt, and demise. It is the one modification for all mistakes of perception; the resolution of the apparent opposites on which this world is created. Its kindly light displays all things from an alternative point of view, reflecting the believed system that rises from the knowledge and coming back to God not only possible but inevitable. What was observed as injustices done to one by someone else, now becomes a demand for help and for the union? Sin, illness, and attack are seen as misunderstandings calling for medication through kindness and love. Defenses are put down as where there is no attack there is no need for them. Our brothers’ needs become our own, as they are taking the voyage with us as we go to God. Without us, they would lose their way. Without them, we could never find our own.
Forgiveness is mysterious in Heaven, where the need for it would be unbelievable. However, in this world, mercy is an essential rectification for all the faults that we have made. To offer mercy is the only way for us to have it, for it reflects the law of Heaven that giving and receiving are the same. Heaven is the expected state of all the Sons of God as He created them. Such is their certainty forever. It has not altered because it has been forgotten.
Forgiveness is the means by which we will recall. Through forgiveness, the intellect of the world is reversed. The forgiven world becomes the gate of Heaven, because by its mercy we can, at last, forgive ourselves. Holding no one convict to guilt, we become free. Acknowledging Christ in all our brothers, we know His Presence in ourselves. Overlooking all our misunderstandings, and with nothing from the past to grasp us back, we can remember God. Beyond this, learning cannot go. When we are ready, God Himself will take the last step in our return to Him.
Who Is David Hoffmeister:
Mystic David Hoffmeister is a breathing demonstration that harmony is possible. His mild manner and fluent, non-compromising expression are a flair to all. David Hoffmeister is world-renowned for his everyday teachings about mystical awakening. His clearness about the meaning of compassion and his fundamental use of mindful movie-watching in the release of judgment is unmatched. The transparency of the message he parts points straight to the Source.
The Message of ACIM:
Our sincere fear is not that we are insufficient. Our sincere fear is that we are authoritative beyond measure. It is our light, not our gloominess, that most scare us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be bright, beautiful, gifted, fabulous? Really, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing rational about shrinking so that other people won’t feel self-doubting around you. We are all destined to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everybody. And as we let our own light shine, we instinctively give other people approval to do the same. As we’re enlightened from our own fear, our existence automatically liberates others.
ACIM has a simple message it mildly teaches in a teaching, affectionate Voice, in the Voice of Christ: you have two picks when it comes to your liberty of choice?—?fear and love. That’s it?—?that’s what every “problem” in the world boils down to. And fear cannot be since it is not a fragment of God, because all outside of God is death. Then you only have one choice?—?and that is love. Love is life and harmony, and a mind at harmony connects with God.
Communication with God is life, imagination, boundless power. Everything that makes you feel unimportant, envious, annoyed, remorseful, unforgiving springs from fear, products of the ego that just want to abolish you. That is the only lure, to battle attack in all its many forms. Because when you attack, you’re attacking yourself and cutting off communication with God.
When individuals ask, how can there be a God when there are so much agony and sorrow in the world, God didn’t create that, we did. But the present darkness is deteriorating away like eroded cliffs under the flood of spiritual hunger. And this is one drift that will win out.
The Conclusion:
Conferring to the Course in miracles, the nature of the dream world we are now existing in is that it does not signify an honest reality but only a supposed projection of a deceptive separation from God from which rose our deceptive ego and its intertwining of this dream of a physical world separate from God as an escape of the ego from its dream of the following punishment of God. This dream world was not produced by our current distinct egos, but by one original ego which broke off in its understood world and then gradually split into the multiple egos, we practice as individual human beings today. But once in this dream world, we have to live in it and survive with it in a justly responsible and affectionate, forgiving way, as Jesus imparted us, so that we may wake up from the dream as soon as the experience of our schooling in this classroom is accomplished, and turn back again to the heavenly union with God we never really vanished. Christian thinkers object to the idea that we never really do wrong or turned away from God, and that in a dream world we could have the essential free will to make honest right decisions or choose to return to God. They fear the reality and vital importance of the mortal world would vanish, since only real persons, they believe, can make reliable moral decisions.
A Course in Miracles does not reject a physical death within the level of the dream. What it does say, truly, is that there are two types of death. There is the death that originates through responsibility and fear, and the fear of judgment from the ego’s expected image of God. And then there is death which is defined as a quiet laying down of the body when our effort is done, knowing that we have satisfied the drive of being here; namely, to have educated to be more loving and merciful. And then our death is a passive one.
Another way of asserting the goal of A Course in Miracles is that it is to live in this world in a passive way, not with all the conflict, both universal as well as personal. And it does say, in detail, that knowledge?—?which is the Course’s other word for Heaven (actually a kind of Gnostic use of the word “knowledge”)?—?is not the goal of this Course, harmony is a peaceful perception of the dream. It is a way of existing with each other?—?having the state of mind in which there is no war, no wish to seize other people’s place, and no need to covet what is not ours.
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