The 'world' and A Course in Miracles

A Course in Miracles has been often been taken as a thought system to be intellectually understood and applied to one’s life in hope to improve it - because that is the habit and culture of the times we mostly live in. I don't know if that is altogether helpful. It was not my guidance to undertake that approach. It seems to me to be like making the error real and then attempting to fix it. I find it helpful to remain in not knowing until the Spirit illuminates. (And not pre-empt this with comparisons, deductions and interpretations that can only express what you already ‘know’).

I feel it is in opening relationship with Holy Spirit – using the Course as it serves – that facilitates a corrected thought system. The Holy Spirit is nothing more than your – my right Mind. And is the correction for wrong mindedness. One Mindedness is uninterrupted while we frighten ourselves with ideas that seem to make love unreal. This must be so despite the experience we mutually tend to invite and reinforce via judgment applied and believed – which you associate with the messed up world.

Rather than enter into relationship with Holy Spirit we will while ego-bound much rather associate externally. This is hardly something to be surprised at for this is the pattern that the Course is offered to un-stick us from. Because we cannot relate externally and enjoy real relationship – its just arbitrary forms that have shared definitions but don't mean anything except a lack of joy is occurring in the mind that asserts its ‘new clothes’.

The forms of truths can get bandied about as currency that children use like shields and sticks to play with.
But the Truth is beyond form – and yet not beyond realisation.
It must be the truth of you – if not the validation of any ideas about you that you have come to accept as you.
It cannot be put into words. But there are innumerable teachings and sayings that are truth inspired – and at the level of form they do not agree.

The participation in the desire for healing is the context in which truths become keys to be used and passed beyond.

No matter how good an understanding I develop I must altogether be willing to let it all go if I am to let love Be itself. As you allow yourself to released of the world and its self you are free to behold with innocent eyes. What is there to behold? There is really nothing outside our mind but that is not true in respect of the fenced off mind who has projected onto and dissociated from Self – and makes it ‘other’.

If we used the term form for world and the term Spirit for Meaning would it be difficult to see that the forms are the vehicles of Expression and not anything of themselves at all?
Yet we have learned to take forms and give them our own meanings.

In violation of the 1st and 2nd commandments. There is no Reality but Reality. To accord reality to made images (judgements) is to worship your own reflection as a maker. Even though the images are freeze frames from the Living Flow. For the Now is Alive and is the only Life.
“Behold I make all things new!”
“ Er hang on Dad – I want to explore this idea I have.
“I am the Alpha and the Omega”
“Yes I know dad but I have this project that I am attending to in the meantime”.
“You are my dearly beloved Son”
“Can you stop interfering – I am finding it hard to keep my focus on my work here” (slams door)


Forms are tangible because they are recognisably serving the function of identifying Expression.
They identify as extension of the truly projected or shared Mind– and the reflection of the withheld mind. The latter obscures the former while the withholding – or judgment – is held to.
Now when the world of ego having an experience all for himself herself as they determine it, is released to the totality of what is simply the indivisible truth, will you call it World, or Be ing or Mind or Living Universe or God or Totality or Selflessness or Emptyness or The no Mind or Creation or something no one has ever called it before?

And when you attempt to communicate it you will find that you cannot express it in any but the terms of the experiences of separation. Yet it communicates through you as spontaneous play of relationship.
How many words does it take to open to the spontaneous play of felt relationship? None.

Recognition renders the form transparent of to its function. The world disappears as any sense of separation-experience. Because there can be no separation. Only a split mind that wants to play at separation and has become mesmerised in its own game to the forgetting of what it is.

Now lets say that you focus on the form of an aspect of the Glory of Being and hold that image in your attention, disregarding the flowing movement of being, then you are holding a judgment. Making exclusion. It may be that the image is Gloriously alive and energising to give attention to and that the act of lingering is itself a feeling of Bliss – but the process of leaving is engaged and the prodigal has forgot his Father while raiding the fridge!

It’s late here and this may read all awry tomorrow but I feel to share it as it is any way.

In Peace

Brian

Special relationship

Special relationship is an A Course in Miracles term for holy relationship being (mis)used for unholy purpose.
Basically the ego only sees form (its own asserted meanings) and thus is blind to Innate Meaning. (The Course calls this content).

Relationships are getting devices to the ego.

Bu they are the opportunity to share love – to know what love is; to know what you Are.

In any moment that we presently open to Spirit and allow Relationship to Be – our relationship is holy. The Holy spirit needs and uses our special relationships – IF you allow this – to teach and free the mind of its self delusion.

The thing that is to be abandoned is the wilful exertion and demand: “Me, my and mine’”
This has to be seen for what it is – as it is – by who you really are.
Then it will not be desired when you see its cost is the loss of ‘Knowing Thy Self’ – which is shared joy, fulfilment, peace and a radiant disposition. Love knows itself love and is a disposition of ‘I love you’. Split mind has lost what love is in search of specialness and can only say ‘do you love me’ or I will do the form of love to you ...if or as long as ...

One of the great Initiations that awaits anyone who has not yet really let love Be is to be ‘welcome to the human race’ and to enter into joyful and real relationship with one and with each and with all. Our essential humanity is our Divinity embodied. The realisation of such an initiation is the same as the Prodigal’s return. Your relationship with anyone is your brother recognised or unrecognised.
The recognition of Brother or Sister is the awakening Mind of the Son. Creation. The Father expressed.

The seeming un-spiritual-ness of others must be a reflection of the use to which we are putting the relationship. Spiritual is just a term for real, genuine, honest, actual direct present living. It has become associated with otherworldly metaphysical thinking. This is nothing without love.

In Peace

Brian

The Universe does not dissappear - it is Revealed

Life is not cling-able or controllable. This isn't fatalistic because Life is infinitely appreciate-able as it is. That the mind-set of control must be abandoned to regain participation as joy is just the way it is. But focussing on the dark or the difficult only feeds it.

I have been Graced to be aware of the Light in which I am Created.
It is the very and pure light of love. This has nothing of any currency or value to anything that the ego-identity values or aspires. Absolutely nothing. Why would it be said - ‘no man looks on God and lives’?
It is so. Release as Jesus shows and there is a dawning of Spirit in the mind that thought itself limited in and by a body.

If anything in these (totally inadequate) words resonates – it is the same. It is direct. It is present.

There is no world here.
This is always true – you cannot be a a body in a world.
(But you can be through a body in communion with the mind that is the truth of the world).

The division of inside outside is a tool – applied to an Indivisibility.
When the inner and the outer are as one – thy whole body be full of light.

It (was) too close to what I am to be ascribed attributes of time and space. But the seed-root essence of all things is Here. My eyes were as a newly woke – I have a much greater intuition of the ’world’ that is Oneness than I have memory imprint.

All the world (was) outshone – and in no way (was) anything done to it. Nor did it go anywhere else.
Attention was surrendered to its source. This was spontaneous and did not really constitute an experience that I can say happened to me – because the absence of ‘me’ was the very spontaneity that let the Light – of itself – know itself – and magnify at its root. It is all things.

There is a phrase - ‘unfinished business’ - this is the best I can say for why the process of focus that we call the world took my attention again.
This ‘world’ and its dreaming mind is held in a Space and Light and Silence of which the human mind cannot conceive. I cant at all conceive it.
But I know that this knowing is the Life itself. God is the Knowing God. There can be none other. To be an other is to forget the Knowing in self-limitation.
Nothing in all my experience of Grace or Love has ever denied Individuality. To the contrary. But Individuality is not independently asserted will. It is the Presence of the Father as the totality of what is be-ing right where you are.

That Divine Interruption was nine years after a previous opening had uncovered the roots of terror – why? because I refused and denied the truth. It had no place in it for 'me'. I would not let go of 'me'.

I was then totally unprepared and had no living capacity for intimacy in myself – or with another.
Terror was a part of the result of a desire to force a crash landing as self survival. No wonder.

But even in the most fearful extremity there was a part of the mind that was curious – that wanted to return to where I was running from. This was a moment’s incongruity to me then for I would in that fear have trod on anyone to get my own head 'above water'.
But the realisation was that my so called life was a lie - a running away from love, from my self – all dressed up and hidden in 'a world'. I now see that consciously running away was the first step of love’s awakening in me. In the process of reconfiguring the vehicle to receive Light..

After that I had a crash course in learning of love because I could not seal the doors by judging the Opening as evil – or indeed insane.
It just isn't in me to do this. But I see that many do and I understand. I would have too if I could have.
But I am grateful to have been led from such a mind.

Now in truth I have to say that the choice for my-self-apart - was a mechanism to which I have attachment. It was and is not the choice of my heart, but was an expression of confusion.
Yet as a result of there being a love of truth in me - despite great fear - I came to know my heart and trust it and share love.


The shift from being to thinking is a sleight of mind.

The real world is the expression of love within the framework of a self-world.
The Father is Reality and gives it to the Son who is the manifestation – the embodiment – the expression. The Son has no reality but the Father’s, but is the Father’s will embodied – in languages that are knowable, recognisable, that feel like something.
Whether the body is perceived in seed thought, light, thoughts, feelings, desires or density – its divinity is that it witnesses for you. That you are.
Now I confess that I have learned to see other bodies in ways that can really freak me out – but I know that the willingness to look beyond the body as an object and connect in blessing and recognition with my Brother Sister in God’s Son is to gain the vision that can see the one more and more clearly.

Simply holding a hand
feeling the love
in the ordinary light of awareness.
We turn to meet
To look upon this one
with no trace or stain of past.

Beloved!
this recognition grew
and all about and everyone
the same.

All was bright
All was clear
nothing to obscure.
totally present

Invisible to the world.
Right in the open.
Time waits outside
My Father’s House
is Eternal Love.


The witnesses to willingness are needed in a world devoted to wilfulness.
Giving as we have received, we learn to keep.
Our gratitude for love is the willingness to share it.
Our Brother brings remembrance to us.
As we are willing to receive.


Brian

If the world is real, all fear & suffering is real too

What we experience and believe as the world cannot be separated from the distortions of perception and conception.

I recall Raj’s metaphor of pushing a fist against a rubber sheet.
It seems to push back.
While the distortion is being applied the experience is one that has an undertone of dissonance.

The seeming entity that is inferred by the distortion is never an achiever or an actuality.
The immediate and actual recognition of the distorting force for what it actually is – (desire-judgement-exclusion) – allows the release of a mind loop that now makes no sense at all – it automatically falls off.

This is a mentality that sought to determine its own reality by judging all that it is as symbol – which are desired, hated, real, unreal etc.

Be glad indeed that we have no power to create Reality!
And that the power by which the self and world were made real is one that can simply be released.
And the ever true will stand obvious in a Light you can cover but not stop being.

The ‘unreality of the world’ does not constitute a negation of the beautiful, the good and the true – in you or I or any thing that is.
It is not a justification for non involvement in life - but a call to True Involvement.

But while we put our treasure out from us we see it as if it is out there.
In a realm of change that reflects thinking-perceiving apart from God.
And yet clinging only deprives us now and now.
Therefore Rejoice in the world in trust that the Real is always with you and its Guidance knows the way of Sanity.


The ego is identified as a dual self-world – they are one.
When a significant other leaves us our grounding mappings are untethered!
Because we use the world and all in it to validate and maintain what we call our self.
Their isn't an ego and a world or an ego in the world. It is a trick.
Exquisitely designed as a playground, a classroom, always serving the function You accept for it.
The world has always reflected the self.
You could say the World is Always reflecting Self.
But when it appears to reflect a separated self, it appears as a separated fragmented externality that seems to be attempting to separate you from your very life! Yet the ‘life’ to which we cling is a fenced off fragment of an indivisibility. Thus it is the belief in a fence to which we cling. Which at root is the preference given to the dream of independent authorship.

Know Thy Self is an inevitability. It is absolutely the law.
To know thy self image is to be attempting to not know Thy Self.
You can push at a rubber sheet and it distorts,
A distorted lens gives a distorted image.
The attempt to separate cannot succeed. But it can be given considerable – if not total – belief.
The judgement upon the self-image is a further step where the force of Light and Love is unconsciously harnessed to drive and maintain the belief. This level has to be undone of its mask. For it is here that the world is experienced as a fearsome and seemingly undeniable density.
This is the reflection of maintained and justified guilt.
Here be dragons and monsters.
And knights and fights and all the self righteous thrill of the chase.
The dread terror of being stalked.
The monsters to which we sacrifice our youth and vitality to cling to the known.
The possessions that increasingly possess.
The civil veneer that is a flimsy bulwark against the barbarian hordes.

Its all an inside job.
Played upon a Big Screen.

The process of the separating mind is like a virus. Self replicating.
Go forth and multply!
This is the law.
Except that the uncreative ‘goes’ into self illusion and depreciates.
Depletes, collapses, densifies, exhausts and undermines itself.

It believes in death as salvation and seeks to die a little in order to get what it wants.
So it forgoes more and more of itself to maintain its grip.

It isn't just a bodyminded one that gets old. The world gets old.
‘Born of the one light, Eden saw play’.
Yet the Revelation of God is summarised thus:
“Behold! I make all things new!”

Innocent of the past.
Unmindful of future.
There is an always.
That can be overlooked.
But cannot lose you.

Because it is your truth
it can truly reach wherever you think you are.
Because you have used truth as illusion and illusion as truth you cannot tell apart without asking of the one who is with you now.
The desire to be restored to sanity must be the willingness to lay the mind down.
Such a willingness can be discovered.
Because the desire for insanity fades or falls away.

The will to wake yourself up is only true if it expresses the will of the Father who gives your will to you.

The scribe is a nothing but a symbol of willingness. Yes.

Does such a trust in love get one into deep water?

Only when the mind that I am releasing seizes me unaware and I let it think as if it were Me!

in Love's blessing
Brian

If waking up were as simple as clicking fingers thrice would you do it now?

The one who wishes to be liberated is the mind that can and must be understood as a belief in entrapment. The awake do not wish to be liberated – they extend liberation because they are freedom to be.
The mind that demands distraction and displacement is not in essence changed by its acts – it loses Self Remembrance while it dissociates. Being as if not this actuality, is thinking, experienced in freedom to be.

If there is a choice it is always and only made this instant.
Click them fingers by letting God click them As this very Instant of Experience! Not an experience over and against an experiencer – but the instant of being – as this. as this.

Choice is between. As long as there seems to be between then there will seem to be choice. But in honesty there is only the ‘choice’ to accept or deny the love that is now. And only by the power of love can love be denied. There is a limit to the capacity to deny what is. It breaks down because it is not Creative, Eternal or True. When it breaks down, what is True simply is revealed as is. Perhaps love is a limitation - but in love is Life given without withholding. We are not children of a withholding Source. That is a picture in the mind.

Truth is not revealed to a thinker - though thinking may return after the break in ego-signal. In any interruption to the continuity of ego scripting Truth is revealed where you are. All expressions of love are maximal. And in terms of our structures of meaning we may have the trace experience of this totality in terms and language that is relevant and acceptable to us in our current sense of identity and yet furthers the process that supports the breakdown of the machine-self as a loving re-emergence amidst an insanity. Until the insanity is clearly recognised and rendered impotent or meaningless.

‘You cant be totally committed sometimes’. - ACIM
So your total commitment is the Fact of your Holy Spirit Mind. the ego illusion is not fact. It can seem real. It cant be real. So you cant really do it or be it – you can only wish it and experience it imaginatively. And that imagined self cannot do or be anything of its own. It is a scripted play.

There can be thinking, and there can be thinking I am the thinker of thoughts but that’s all only thinking. There isn't really a thinker and there isn't anyone to have to do or not do anything to wake up.
Waking up is not something that can exist in the future. There really isn't the one we think we are to make or not make decisions that do or don't allow or forbid the Truth. Because that is a ploy in a story that plays to a wish to see truth like this or like that. Who wishes this?
The moment of current attention that is giving it value. That is all.
This is not in my mind – as I might think ‘I’. But it is the only mind there is – and by it is awareness known
Becoming honest about the use to which we put our mind is a step of allowing truth to shine on whatever thoughts are enjoined.

The notion that there is anything to lose from truth is fear – not fact.
In any instance where truth has been chosen over fear the actuality does not support the fear.
There is no fear in perfect love. This is what you are as Creation - or are forgetting in miscreation.
Fear has the capacity to block awareness of Self- because that is its given function. The split mind is fearful. To heal the split undoes fear.

There is no one who can wake up – that’s just thinking.
Waking up is a symbol as it is placed in time. It is as useful as the use to which it is put.
An alarm clock makes a good jackhammer drill to a dreaming mind.
Concerted intentional guided seeking is necessary to exhaust the seeker. Variable and conflicting goals play out a strategy to preserve a sense of promise where none can be found excepting a sense of achievement expressed as delay. A set of brakes.

The thoughts that emanate from the truth are loving thoughts for they do not serve a self or other apart. They witness to a self-with that has had to be constantly blanked and denied, now and now – in order to think the scripts of separation.

The world we see can not actually be the separation it can only be the reality that is our mind unrecognised in Mind, while a machination runs its course until it is noticed, accepted and released.

What is left if the machination is utterly undone? – why Life! - in all its qualities of form and colour and play without the drag of ‘me and mine’ interposing and effectively denying the appreciation of What Life is – right here now.

But not the ‘life’ of a bodybag with a brain subordinated to a wilfulness that locks onto form and inexorably kills itself over and over. Life is what is calling all who thought they chose the lifeless and made it real - home.

Every opening will seem to be at some point lost or covered by a closing. It is not useful to think how much is there of a habit to undo, in order to regain or get to somewhere.
This is the thinking that cuts the present life and puts it as if in the future - after the problem is solved.

When the ups are not exulted in and the downs are not indulged the evenness of mind that is a depth below the superficial stands forth. It was there anyway but now the activity of thinking isn't the pet project that dominates and seesaws.

I might insist I am as full of shit as anyone else. It is a lie. But it is offered in love as a temporary relief from a periodically unbearable light of innocence that undoes the beliefs by which mind attempts to secure in fear.

It is not difficult : it is impossible! – therefore there is the call to transcend such definitions in holding the willingness that there be a way and that it is discoverable now. A way to be with. One step at a time.
I thought I was climbing a steep place alone – but it was a dance with you!

Nothing is more dangerous to a mind’s joyful participation than truths to which it holds more dear than Truth.
It remains true that the use to which they are put is in the mind within you, the mind within me.

Desire not a hidey hole for that which undermines sharing all that is beautiful, good and true by painting a picture of a me that is not as God reveals to me that I am – even though it is a burden I have long cherished. It has always only kept me from the appreciation of God – not my idea God – but from Being before and beyond the world and time and thought. From Light that has no end or limit or circumference.

These words are unspeakable. Let it be said straight from the One that speaks all things true and who alone is truly heard.

In Peace

Brian

True Desire

The True desire of our heart is simply uncovered by revelation.
It cannot be manufactured or coerced and yet remain truth.
And like anything True it is one with all that Truth is.

Truth can be obscured from our awareness.
Identification with the seeming capacity to do so sets up the problem beneath the problems.
For not knowing the truth That we Are is the only sickness.

Arising out of the grasp and distortion of reality we make a mind that has confused individuality of God’s Expression with a private mind thinking love-lessly.
We can choose to use our mind uncreatively – but not outside the law of creation.
If we choose separating from Love’s Movement or Felt Life, then we see and experience as ‘separate(ing) mind’.
As long as we value or desire anything in this mindset of force we will bind ourselves to its loveless vision.

False desire may operate automatically by deeply entrenched habit and seems to be reflected as reality within and without.
Minds that share this addiction are all programmed as validating each other to maintain the game in which conflict is taken to be really real.
Yet the complexity of defensiveness that has been made to attempt to coerce truth to an unshared or false desire is irrelevant to its foundation – which is that of remaining unaware of your true desire.

A sense of our true desire may arise from any unguarded moment.
To accept and receive this knowing is to allow its movement to embody through us.
It is always Life and is always Present. Its recognition is in the heart – directly.

It may also express as a result of a sense of frustrated being that IS presently recognised as essentially unfulfilling and not actually desired.
This is a state of mind from which liberation is desirable.
Yet attention is trapped in its own attempt to solve or salve itself within the unmindful premise of its own seemingly independent power.

Holy Spirit is Original mind restated in which we can directly look upon thought and attention and their results as a knowing and not merely a further thinking.

It is also the honesty of seeing and observing altogether presently. For when nothing else is asserted in its place it is revealed as the living Presence of what you are – at a level and in a form that is relevant to releasing your current level of ignorance.

We mostly have very little idea the degree to which our every experience, interaction, communication and perception is predicated upon thought and desire.
These thoughts can be translated by aligning with awakened or true desire such that less and less is obstructing the natural realisation of truth.
For Realisation is simply the release of the mind that one is not, into direct experience that is primarily felt as communion- participation.

This can be expressed thus:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. Love your neighbour as yourself.

Such is not a social 'should' but the truth revealed and expressed. The Truth is Given - but its acceptance requires freely releasing the false.

The nature of the false was its replacement of truth, and so the restoration of the truth of the mind that you truly are, is the perfect home-be-ing of a heart that feels and knows and expresses and embodies life – without apology or justification.


This has been a meditation for me
and is also shared.

Practicing the presence
is not really a word thing
but words are not really word things.
They are messengers of the mind that gives and receives.


In Peace

Brian