MONDAY FEBRUARY 15, 2016
Purpose Decides Direction
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A COURSE IN MIRACLES
CH 4 "THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL"
VI. THE EGO-BODY ILLUSION  
 
When you make a decision of purpose, then, you have made a decision about your future effort, a decision which will remain in effect unless you change the decision
A COURSE IN MIRACLES
WORKBOOK Part I
INTRODUCTION
WorkBook Intro
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1 A theoretical foundation such as the text is necessary as a background to make these exercises meaningful. Yet it is the exercises which will make the goal possible. An untrained mind can accomplish nothing. It is the purpose of these exercises to train the mind to think along the lines which the course sets forth.
 
2 The exercises are very simple. They do not require more than a few minutes, and it does not matter where or when you do them. They need no preparation. They are numbered, running from 1 to 365. The training period is one year. Do not undertake more than one exercise a day.
 
3 The purpose of these exercises is to train the mind to a different perception of everything in the world. The workbook is divided into two sections, the first dealing with the undoing of what you see now and the second with the restoration of sight. It is recommended that each exercise be repeated several times a day, preferably in a different place each time and, if possible, in every situation in which you spend any long period of time. The purpose is to train the mind to generalize the lessons, so that you will understand that each of them is as applicable to one situation as it is to another.
 
4 Unless specified to the contrary, the exercise should be practiced with the eyes open, since the aim is to learn how to see. The only rule that should be followed throughout is to practice the exercises with great specificity. Each one applies to every situation in which you find yourself and to everything you see in it. Each day's exercises are planned around one central idea, the exercises themselves consisting of applying that idea to as many specifics as possible. Be sure that you do not decide that there are some things you see to which the idea for the day is inapplicable. The aim of the exercises will always be to increase the application of the idea to everything. This will not require effort. Only be sure that you make no exceptions in applying the idea.
 
5 Some of the ideas you will find hard to believe, and others will seem quite startling. It does not matter. You are merely asked to apply them to what you see. You are not asked to judge them, nor even to believe them. You are asked only to use them. It is their use which will give them meaning to you, and show you they are true. Remember only this-you need not believe them, you need not accept them, and you need not welcome them. Some of them you may actively resist. None of this will matter nor decrease their efficacy. But allow yourself to make no exceptions in applying the ideas the exercises contain. Whatever your reactions to the ideas may be, use them. Nothing more than this is required.
 
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DAILY LESSON
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 L e s s o n 46
God is the Love in which I forgive.
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1 God does not forgive because He has never condemned. And there must be condemnation before forgiveness is necessary. Forgiveness is the great need of this world, but that is because it is a world of illusions. Those who forgive are thus releasing themselves from illusions, while those who withhold forgiveness are binding themselves to them. As you condemn only yourself, so do you forgive only yourself. 
 
2 Although God does not forgive, His Love is nevertheless the basis of forgiveness. Fear condemns, and love forgives. Forgiveness thus undoes what fear has produced, returning the mind to the awareness of God. For this reason, forgiveness can truly be called salvation. It is the means by which illusions disappear. 
 
3 Today's exercises require at least three full five-minute practice periods and as many shorter applications as possible. Begin the practice periods by repeating today's idea to yourself, as usual. Close your eyes as you do so and spend a minute or two in searching your mind for those whom you have not forgiven. It does not matter "how much" you have not forgiven. You have forgiven them entirely or not at all. 
 
4 If you are doing the exercises well, you should have no difficulty in finding a number of people you have not forgiven. It is a safe rule that anyone you do not like is a suitable subject. Mention each one by name and say: 
 
5 God is the Love in which I forgive you, [name]
 
6 The purpose of the first phase of today's practice is to put you in the best position to forgive yourself. After you have applied the idea for today to all those who have come to mind, tell yourself, 
 
7 God is the Love in which I forgive myself.
   
8 Then devote the remainder of the practice period to offering related ideas such as: 
 
9 God is the Love with which I love myself.
God is the Love in which I am blessed.
 
10 The form of the applications may vary considerably, but the central idea should not be lost sight of. You might say, for example: 
 
11 I cannot be guilty because I am a Son of God.
I have already been forgiven.
No fear is possible in a mind beloved of God.
There is no need to attack because Love has forgiven me.
 
12 The practice period should end, however, with a repetition of today's idea as originally stated. 
 
13 The shorter applications may consist either of a repetition of the idea for today in the original or in a related form, or in more specific applications if needed. They will be needed at any time during the day when you become aware of any kind of negative reaction to anyone, present or not. In this event, tell him silently, 
 
14 God is the Love in which I forgive you.
   
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Lesson 46
God is the Love in which I forgive. 
 
Sarah's Commentary: 
  
How do you think about God? If you think He made this world where people suffer and die, you may wonder what kind of God would let all that happen. He cannot be perfect love and still be responsible for the condition of the world. God is not both wrathful and loving. God is only Love, and there is no separation between this God of Love and the Self as we truly are. If we buy into the story of Adam and Eve, we buy into the concept that God banished them from paradise for eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This means God set up this scenario in the first place and tested Adam and Eve to see if they would do the wrong thing. God, being God, would have known this temptation would lead to their fall, wouldn't He? Why would we trust a God as manipulative as that? A loving God would not do that.
 
In the book, "Disappearance of the Universe" by Gary Renard, Arten describes the situation like this:
 
"And so God goes on and creates Adam and then gets him a date, Eve. Life is paradise. But God gives them this one rule. Do anything you want kids, knock yourselves out, but don't you dare eat the fruit from that tree of knowledge over there. So the serpent does its thing. Eve takes a bite and tempts Adam who takes a bite.
 
"Now there's hell to pay. Big angry Maker kicks Adam and Eve out of paradise. He even tells Eve she's going to suffer terrible pain during childbirth just for good measure. That will teach her! But wait just a minute here. If God is God, wouldn't He be perfect? And if He is perfect, then wouldn't He know everything? Even today's parents know the surest way to get children to do something is to tell them they can't. So if God is God and He knows everything, then what has He done here?"
 
Even though we may not have been raised on this Biblical version, it is in our culture and part of our thinking. It is the God the ego has made. Then we tell God Who He is. We've made Him up in our own image and insist we are right in our definition of Him, which is the same as the Bible defines Him. How can we trust a God like that? The story is symbolic of the making of the world of bodies and of the unconscious mind. In the Course, the story concludes with the statement that nowhere does it say, when Adam fell asleep, he ever woke up. This is then symbolic of our mind that has fallen asleep and has never woken up as yet. Now we are on a path of awakening, and in this process, we take the small steps each day the Course prescribes, as a way of remembering who we really are as spiritual beings. The steps we take are those toward learning forgiveness, as described in this Lesson and throughout the Course.
 
An important step in this learning is to look at our relationship to God and who we think He is. This Lesson affirms God has never condemned. He is not this vengeful, punishing, angry God we have made Him to be. He does not bring us Lessons. He does not bring us suffering for our own good. He is only Love. We don't need His forgiveness because He has never condemned, contrary to the story of Adam and Eve.
 
In the story of the life of C.S. Lewis as portrayed in the movie Shadowlands, the theme is all about questioning how a loving God would bring all the suffering into people's lives. It reflects the generally held view of God, Who brings lessons and makes us suffer for our own good and to build our character. This is really a twisted perspective of a loving God. Only our unhealed mind creates suffering. Our guilt brings suffering. We are shown in this Lesson the way out. Jesus is showing us how we can learn to forgive ourselves and thus recognize "God is the Love in which I love myself." (W.PI.46.5.3) Let's look more closely at this Lesson to understand how we can apply it to our lives as part of our awakening to the truth of who we are.
 
In this Lesson, we are being introduced to a new way of looking at forgiveness. We see forgiveness is not something we need from God. We only need it for ourselves. We also learn forgiveness has nothing to do with anyone else. What we are forgiving is a projection of our own guilt we have put onto another person. In Lesson 45, we learn, "There is no relationship between what is real [God's Love] and what you think is real," (W.45.1.3) which is all the things that seem to happen to us in this world. In today's Lesson, Jesus tells us, "Forgiveness is the great need of this world, but that is because it is a world of illusions." (W.46.1.3) What we are doing when we forgive is just releasing this world of illusions. This world seems very real to us, but it is not. In this world of dreams that began with the belief in sin, this belief must be undone through forgiveness.
 
If the world is not real, anything we think we have done has not happened, and anyone we think we have wronged, has not been wronged. We will understand this more fully in later Lessons. Right now, we need to understand that the only one being hurt by lack of forgiveness is ourselves. Our lack of forgiveness keeps us in chains, bound and fearful. Forgiveness undoes all this. This Lesson says fear is what has produced all of our illusions. "Fear condemns and love forgives. Forgiveness thus undoes what fear has produced, returning the mind to the awareness of God. For this reason, forgiveness can truly be called salvation. It is the means by which illusions disappear." (W.46.2.2-5) Forgiveness undoes the wrong mind of fear and hate. When the fear and hate are undone and gone from our minds, all that remains is awareness we are love. This is what salvation is. God does not save us from our sin because the truth is we have not sinned. We have just bought into the myth of the ego that we have done something terrible and must now run away into the body and the world and hide from God. What we are saved from is the belief in our sin and guilt, and thus belief in the reality of this world. It is our salvation because it saves us from the illusion.
 
How does all this apply to our view of God? In traditional religious views, God forgives our sins, which means we truly have sinned, sin is real, and thus we are guilty. If we are truly guilty, there is no basis for forgiveness. God would first have to affirm our guilt as deserved and then forgive it. It would mean the world is real and God would have to save us from our sinfulness. What Jesus is telling us is sin has no reality except in our belief. We are told in the Course the Principle of Atonement means we have never left our Source. We continue to be holy and innocent, still in the mind of God. In our belief we separated from His love, we now think we have done something terribly wrong and deserve punishment. Forgiveness helps us remember we could not separate from love and we are not guilty.
 
"Those who forgive are thus releasing themselves from illusions, while those who withhold forgiveness are binding themselves to them. As you condemn only yourself, so do you forgive only yourself." (W.46.1.4-5) What we do in the illusion is project our guilt onto others and make them responsible for our situation. What we forgive is the responsibility we put on others for what is actually in our own minds. In effect, we are not forgiving anyone outside of us, but only our projection of our own guilt.
 
In the context of relationships with the people who we believe have done something to us, opportunities arise for forgiveness. It may be people we don't like, people we actively condemn, or people whom we think we love who anger us. "Mention each one by name, and say: 'God is the Love in which I forgive you, (name)'." (W.46.4.3-4) "It does not matter 'how much' you have not forgiven them. You have forgiven them entirely or not at all." (W.46.3.4-5) We are seeing them as separate from us and projecting guilt onto them we don't want to acknowledge in ourselves. Thus, we condemn ourselves together with them by holding them responsible for our guilt, which we have projected onto them.
 
We do this because we can't accept the burden of guilt in ourselves and do not want to take responsibility for it. We are not aware of it in ourselves when we project it onto others. But when we take responsibility for our projections, we put ourselves in a position where we can now see our own guilt by recognizing it in another. Without this, we would not see it in ourselves. Only when we release our guilt, by taking responsibility for it, can we know the truth that we are already forgiven. When our guilt is released from our own minds through forgiveness, we can know "God is the Love in which I love myself," (W.46.5.5) and "I cannot be guilty because I am a Son of God," (W.46.6.3) and "I have already been forgiven." (W.46.6.4)
 
When we carry anger toward someone, we are burdened with a heavy layer of guilt. Releasing this is truly a liberating thing that blesses us. We have all experienced this kind of release and the joy that comes from letting go of our anger and our hate. It is always ourselves whom we forgive. "The purpose of the first phase of today's practice periods is to put you in a position to forgive yourself." (W.46.5.1) Today, we can take an important step in this process and remind ourselves we are releasing ourselves from the thinking of the world, from the illusion that what we experience in the world is real and from the thoughts that keep us in hell.
 
We go together, you and I, either in bondage or in freedom. One brings continued aloneness, depression, anger, and sadness, and the other brings God's peace, connection, joy and freedom. The practice for today involves bringing our grievances, judgments, anger, frustrations, and specialness to the light of God's Love in our minds. It is our self-condemnation we put onto others. Through forgiveness, we take responsibility for our projections of the guilt in our own minds. We recognize there is no one out there. Everyone is a mirror who reflects what is in our minds. When we are willing to bring our projections to the light of God's Love, He shines them away.

Love and blessings, Sarah

VI. The Ego-Body Illusion  

69All things work together for good. There are no exceptions except in the ego's judgment. Control is a central factor in what the ego permits into consciousness and one to which it devotes its maximum vigilance. This is not the way a balanced mind holds together. Its control is unconscious. The ego is further off balance by keeping its primary motivation unconscious and raising control rather than sensible judgment to predominance. The ego has every reason to do this according to the thought system which gave rise to it and which it serves. Sane judgment would inevitably judge against the ego and must be obliterated by the ego in the interest of its self-preservation.
 
70 A major source of the ego's off-balanced state is its lack of discrimination between impulses from God and from the body. Any thought system which makes this confusion must be insane. Yet this demented state is essential to the ego, which judges only in terms of threat or non-threat to itself. In one sense the ego's fear of the idea of God is at least logical, since this idea does dispel the ego. Fear of dissolution from the Higher Source, then, makes some sense in ego-terms. But fear of the body, with which the ego identifies so closely, is more blatantly senseless.
 
71 The body is the ego's home by its own election. It is the only identification with which the ego feels safe, because the body's vulnerability is its own best argument that you cannot be of God. This is the belief that the ego sponsors eagerly. Yet the ego hates the body because it does not accept the idea that the body is good enough to be its home. Here is where the mind becomes actually dazed. Being told by the ego that it is really part of the body and that the body is its protector, the mind is also constantly informed that the body can not protect it. This, of course, is not only accurate but perfectly obvious.
 
72 Therefore the mind asks, "Where can I go for protection?" to which the ego replies, "Turn to me." The mind, and not without cause, reminds the ego that it has itself insisted that it is identified with the body, so there is no point in turning to it for protection. The ego has no real answer to this because there is none, but it does have a typical solution. It obliterates the question from the mind's awareness. Once unconscious, the question can and does produce uneasiness, but it cannot be answered because it cannot be asked. This is the question which must be asked: "Where am I to go for protection?" Even the insane ask it unconsciously, but it requires real sanity to ask it consciously.
 
73 When the Bible says, "Seek and ye shall find," it does not mean that you should seek blindly and desperately for something you would not recognize. Meaningful seeking is consciously undertaken, consciously organized, and consciously directed. The goal must be formulated clearly and kept in mind. As a teacher with some experience, let me remind you that learning and wanting to learn are inseparable. All learners learn best when they believe that what they are trying to learn is of value to them. However, values in this world are hierarchical, and not everything you may want to learn has lasting value.
 
74 Indeed, many of the things you want to learn are chosen because their value will not last. The ego thinks it is an advantage not to commit itself to anything that is eternal because the eternal must come from God. Eternalness is the one function which the ego has tried to develop but has systematically failed. It may surprise you to learn that had the ego wished to do so it could have made the eternal because, as a product of the mind, it is endowed with the power of its own creator. However, the decision to do this, rather than the ability to do it, is what the ego cannot tolerate. That is because the decision, from which the ability would naturally develop, would necessarily involve accurate perception, a state of clarity which the ego, fearful of being judged truly, must avoid.
 
75 The results of this dilemma are peculiar, but no more so than the dilemma itself. The ego has reacted characteristically here as elsewhere because mental illness, which is always a form of ego involvement, is not a matter of reliability as much as of validity. The ego compromises with the issue of the eternal, just as it does with all issues that touch on the real question in any way. By compromising in connection with all tangential questions, it hopes to hide the real question and keep it out of mind. The ego's characteristic busyness with non-essentials is for precisely that purpose.
 
76 Consider the alchemist's age-old attempts to turn base metal into gold. The one question which the alchemist did not permit himself to ask was, "What for?" He could not ask this because it would immediately become apparent that there was no sense in his efforts even if he succeeded. If gold became more plentiful, its value would decrease, and his own purpose would be defeated. The ego has countenanced some strange compromises with the idea of the eternal, making many odd attempts to relate the concept to the unimportant in an effort to satisfy the mind without jeopardizing itself. Thus, it has permitted minds to devote themselves to the possibility of perpetual motion, but not to perpetual thoughts.
 
77 Ideational preoccupations with problems set up to be incapable of solution are also favorite ego devices for impeding the strong-willed from making real learning progress. The problems of squaring the circle and carrying pi to infinity are good examples. A more recent ego attempt is particularly noteworthy. The idea of preserving the body by suspension, thus giving it the kind of limited immortality which the ego can tolerate, is among its more recent appeals to the mind. It is noticeable, however, that in all these diversionary tactics, the one question which is never asked by those who pursue them is, "What for?"
 
78 This is the question which you must learn to ask in connection with everything your mind wishes to undertake. What is the purpose? Whatever it is, you cannot doubt that it will channelize your efforts automatically. When you make a decision of purpose, then, you have made a decision about your future effort, a decision which will remain in effect unless you change the decision.
 
79 Psychologists are in a good position to realize that the ego is capable of making and accepting as real some very distorted associations. The confusion of sex with aggression and the resulting behavior, which is perceived as the same for both, serves as an example. This is "understandable" to the psychologist and does not produce surprise. The lack of surprise, however, is not a sign of understanding. It is a symptom of the psychologist's ability to accept as reasonable a compromise which is clearly senseless-to attribute it to the mental illness of the patient rather than his own and to limit his questions about both the patient and himself to the trivial.
 
80 Such relatively minor confusions of the ego are not among its more profound misassociations, although they do reflect them. Your egos have been blocking the more important questions which your minds should ask. You do not understand a patient while you yourselves are willing to limit the questions you raise about his mind because you are also accepting these limits for yours. This makes you unable to heal him and yourselves. Be always unwilling to adapt to any situation in which miracle-mindedness is unthinkable. That state in itself is enough to demonstrate that the perception is wrong.

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