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

Monthly Archives: November 2011

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ACIM T-29.II The Coming Of the Guest

 

November 29, 2011

Who is this Guest? How is it that this Guest comes/? How do we recognize this Guest? What does this Guest bring? And yet the Course tells us that this Guest has already come, that this Guest had brought us gifts and laid them at our feet. The Course tells us that we cannot see this Guest, but we will recognize its Presence by the presence of the Gifts it brings. How is this so? The Guest may be thought of as Spirit, the Holy Spirit, if you will. It is that Presence and awareness that connects us with the divine, the Presence of the Source, or God. It is that Presence that is within us to help us reawaken to the awareness of who we really are, One with the Source, God, and all of Creation.

We invited the Guest, just by seeking, just by the desire to understand who we are and what purpose we have in this world. In Truth, Spirit has always been within us, for it would be impossible to separate from the One Source. But our mistaken idea that we are separate form our Source has brought us down a path of mistaken ideas and perceptions that we believed and thus thought of ourselves as contained within a physical body. This mistaken idea essentially shut the awareness of God from our minds even though the remembrance of that connection, that communion has always stayed with us. And that remembrance of what is Holy within us is what causes us to seek for it in our separation.

Through identification with our physical bodies have we mistaken death for life. We have made the body’s life life, and Spiritual life coming only at the death of the body. This idea makes life temporary, limited and fleeting. But the body’s life is not our real life. Real life is eternal and unchangeable, without limits, and un-attackable. Though the physical body is temporary, and therefore not real in terms of spiritual life, it does have purpose in this world we live in for a time. It is the means by which we work on our journey to the awareness of who we really are and what is real.

Whatever we think and do, what consciousness we live in, what state of being we are practicing and living exhibit or manifest in the lives we are living on this earth. Our consciousness is reflected in our everyday lives. As we go about our daily business, whatever that may be, we are exhibiting the characteristics of the state of mind we are in at that moment. If we are conscious of the peace, joy, and love of Spirit within us, that consciousness shines through whatever we do in our relationships with each other. In this way our physical bodies function for a holy purpose; to extend the love of God to each other. And so the gifts of the Guest are extended through each and every one of us to each and every one of us. And we reawake to the awareness of who we really are and Oneness of which we all are a part. Live the blessing of the awareness of who we really are.

ACIM T-29.I The Closing of the Gap

November 22, 2011

The Love of God, the love of Spirit is all encompassing. It is in all of creation and extends to all of creation, connecting what is already One in Oneness. Fear is not and cannot ever be in the presence of Love. Fear, an illusion, can only distract us from Love, which is real. In this way we create a small gap between us and another, usually a gap we think of as a “safety” through which we think we can escape from something not real, not of Love. Spirit asks us to recognize we made the gap and to let it disappear, since we realize we made it up in the first place.

We think because we have manifested as a body in this world that our minds are not joined. Nothing is further from the truth. The Mind of God cannot be divided. For if the Mind of God be divided, God’s promise would be broken, and healing would be impossible. The body is neither one nor separate. It is the playground of our learning. It is the vehicle through which we learn who we really are and learn we really are One with each other. Our daily encounters with each other are each a lesson to learn we are joined with that one, with each other. Each of us is the essence of Love and of the Divine. We are created thus. And that Love is all powerful. When we allow ourselves to believe this Truth, we realize the truth about the world and about all of creation. We experience the blessing and peace and joy of our true nature, our true state of being, our Divine Self as One.

In this season of Thanksgiving we often set aside much of our misperception about each other and reach out to help others in a loving way. Allow yourself to go a bit deeper this year. Allow yourself to join with each one in the Mind of the Divine in each other. Set each other free of the limits we have burdened them with in our thoughts. Allow the extension of Love to close the little gap we have left between us. There is no need for escape, for there is no danger. We have nothing to fear from one another except the Love of Spirit. And there is no fear in the Love of Spirit, for the love of Spirit eclipses all that cannot be. Let Spirit and Oneness rise today. Let gratitude flood each of us with the love, joy, and peace of the Divine Presence we are today. I thank you for being One with me and all of Creation in this season. And I invite you to join with me in carrying that joining into each and every day to come. Happy Thanksgiving!

ACIM T-28.VII The Ark of Safety

November 15, 2011

We lack nothing. There is no lack in us. God asks nothing of us and we have no need to ask anything of God. The promise of God’s creation of us is that we (God and us) are One. We always have been, we are now, and we always will be. This is the Will of God. This is the reality of who we really are. Even when we see ourselves as separate and mistakenly think that we can act apart from the One, we are One with each other. The mistaken thought only makes it seem that we are apart. The mistaken thought only makes it seem that we are lonely, attacked, sinful, or have anything to fear. Yet, even though we seem to be in danger, we are safe, cradled in the arms of Oneness.

The relationships we share with each other are truly holy, for we are a part of each other and part of God. We are One and therefore holy. Any idea that denies the truth of our wholeness and our health, our Source of help, and our Call to healing and the Call to heal must certainly be a sick idea. As we deny our true identity, our savior waits, as does the world, for our healing of that one sick thought. And we are not apart from the waiting savior and world, for we are One, but do not see our Oneness. And so we see ourselves as either One or separate, for we cannot see or believe both at once.

Under the mistaken idea that we are not One, we see the world upside down, from a perspective it cannot possibly be rationally understood. So we grasp at any little explanation we can think up. Our world seems to spin out of our control so we make up any explanation that seems to give us a place to get a footing. We then identify our body as our identity. We give it meaning and power it does not have. And so we identify ourselves as separate; our body seems to be our home. We use the body to witness to the dream of separation.

But, the body can be seen differently. We can see the body as our aid to reawaken to the awareness of our true home, the holy home of Oneness we never left. Our true home is built on the awareness of our holy relationships with each other. As we begin to shift our trust and belief to the Source of our being, we find safety in the promise we made with God in creation. The world can rail around us and we rest in the ark of safety in which that promise shelters us. And so the body, our idea we once identified as “me”, becomes a means to liberate us from the mistaken ideas and thoughts we had once thought were true. It then adopts the purpose, just for a little while, of salvation and the return to the awareness of who we really are where we realize we lack nothing.

ACIM T-28.VI The Secret Vows

November 8, 2011

Our bodies do not make us appear separate. Our bodies have no power and no meaning of themselves. Our bodies are just there and do nothing on their own. They are learning tools. And can be used for any purpose we decide to use them for. They carry out the desires and directions of our mind. They do the bidding of our thoughts and beliefs. But they are incapable of doing anything solely on their own. We make the mistake of projecting the responsibility of our thoughts onto the body and thus make it something separate and self determining in our minds.

This mistaken idea is a secret agreement we have made with each other. In fact, it is so secret we have made it secret from our consciousness. Thus we think our bodies, or the world, are totally out of our control and we are its victims, subject to the pain and suffering, the limitations of the body. How else could we forget our divinity, our unity, our limitlessness, except through this mistaken idea we believe is true? We have taken secret vows of separation! In our divine creation we have looked away and secretly vowed to see each other as unconnected, as separate, as completely independent of each other. In this way we shirk responsibility for our thoughts without ever acknowledging they were our thoughts in the first place.

The joy of this agreement is that once one decides not to agree any more, there is no longer an agreement. Once one of us refuses to abide by our mistaken thoughts and ideas we agreed to share, there is no support for the other’s agreed upon or shared thoughts and ideas. There is power in sharing. There is power in agreement. If we agree or share separation, or unreality, we give it the power to appear real in our mind. But when we take that power away by ceasing to agree the mistaken idea, we immediately make that mistaken idea powerless.

Shifting our thoughts and ideas to those aligned with Spirit, with divinity, we have made a new agreement for ourselves and each other. The power of our shared thoughts is shifted to Truth. It is shifted to the awareness of who we really are, the awareness of our unity, our divinity, our limitlessness. We realize the Oneness of our Creation, that which can never be compromised except in our thoughts and the little gap in our mind we have made seem real for ourselves. Let go of those secret vows. Realize that, in the first place, we made them with each other. And relax into the awareness of who we really are. It is our choice to let go of those secret agreements, no one else’s. The real world follows in the wake of our awakening.

ACIM T-25.V The Alternate To Dreams of Fear

November 1, 2011

Sickness, in Course terms, is the separating off of the self from good and keeping what is not good, or fear, in. The sense of sickness is a sense of limitation, a splitting off and a separating from. Sickness is the thought of limitation, splitting off, and separating from. These thoughts are the dreams of fear, the dreams we have mistaken for reality. We have used these dreams we made up and believed them. Then we have reinforced the mistaken dreams with more dreams based on our belief in the first dreams we made up. Thus have we made up this little gap, this idea that we are not connected to one another, that we are separate. And this has developed into the idea that we are independent, and control our individual destiny.

But, God is the alternative to this mindset. God’s Creation is One and inseparable, indivisible. So the healing of the sickness of the mistaken thought is the return to the idea that we are One, united, and joined in Spirit, our true Self. So how do we move from dreams of separation to the awareness of Oneness and who we really are?

The key is in what we believe and what we share. We know that we give power to whatever we believe, for if we believe something, some thought, it seems real and true to us. Our belief that it is real and true makes it so for us because we cannot believe two opposing thoughts at the same time. We cannot believe we are separate while believing we are One with all Creation. Once we begin to right our belief and our thoughts, there is another undoing to do. What do we share? Do we share one another’s dreams and thus support them in their dream? Sharing their dream makes their dream our dream. We reinforce their dreams of fear and limitation. Thus we have again moved ourselves to belief in separation and limitation. It is impossible to see and experience wholeness when we are supporting un-wholeness.

There is a simple solution. There is a saving grace. Spirit asks us to simply withdraw from the support of another’s dream. No dramatics, no confrontation, no convincing, just withdraw from another’s dreams of separation and limitation. We simply refrain from sharing each other’s dreams. The real world is not made up of a little piece from you, and a little piece from me, and a little piece from another. The real world is all of us sharing what we already know, the undisputable truth of our wholeness, love, and holiness that takes us from the illusion of separation to the awareness of who we really are. Turn from the dreams of fear and begin the alternative, the dream of God. Before you know it the dream morphs into the awareness of reality.