A Course In Miracles – San Jose Karl J Vidt, ACIM Student/Teacher

ACIM T-18.I The Substitute Reality

July 25, 2017

We have substituted a “reality” for reality.  “What?” you may say, “That makes no sense.”  And you are right, it makes no sense whatsoever.  We are all One, all joined in Oneness, and so there is only one relationship in reality.  Yet we are constantly substituting one brother or sister for another in our relationships when we are not satisfied with someone.  When one lets us down, we immediately try to fix them to what we think they should be or how they should act.  Then when that doesn’t work we replace them with another that we think will do or act as we wish.  We judge them on how they fulfill our unreasonable expectations of them.  In choosing one above another we are renouncing one in favor of another.  This is separation personified.  And we don’t even recognize we are doing this.  As we repeat this error time and time again, we fragment our perception repeatedly until there’s no semblance of the Oneness of reality left in our awareness.

Spirit, within us, sees this, yet It continues to see us whole and united as One even in the face of our total immersion in the idea of separation.  The egoic thought system sees replacement and substitution where Spirit sees all joined and indivisible.  One would unite; the other separate.  However, nothing can come between what the One has joined and what Spirit sees as one.  But everything seems to come between the fragmented relationships the ego sponsors to destroy.

Substitution is impossible in the presence of love.  Yet, fear involves substitution by definition, for it is love’s replacement.  Fear is both a fragmented and fragmenting emotion.  It seems to take many forms, and each one seems to require a different form of acting out for satisfaction.  The awareness of wholeness and completion are impossible in the mindset of fear.  Fragmentation and fear are the blocks we have placed to the awareness of our divine nature; our wholeness and completeness.

You who believe that God is fear made but one substitution.  It has taken many forms, because it was the substitution of illusion for truth; of fragmentation for wholeness.  It has become so splintered and subdivided and divided again, over and over, that it is now almost impossible to perceive it once was one, and still is what it was.  That one error, which brought truth to illusion, infinity to time, and life to death, was all you ever made.  Your whole world rests upon it.  Everything you see reflects it, and every special relationship that you have ever made is part of it.   T-18.I.4:1-6

The world we seem to see appears mad.  It appears insane.  It is a fragmented world, rooted in the belief in separation that we project on the world.  And so, it appears to be in conflict and conflicted, no two parts of it making sense with another.  The world appears fearful, and rightly so, for fear is what we project on the world.  Do not invest in this mad world, for there is no value in its madness.  Above all, do not be afraid of this twisted world.  It is not real, for it is not what it appears.  It is a substitute for the real world, reality.  Let’s undo the substitution and embrace love.

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