I've been reading A Course In Miracles and it's not the first time I've picked up this book yet I'm not sure I fully understood the profundity of this book until now. This book was written by Helen Schucman channeling Jesus Christ Sananda. The underlying premise is that the greatest miracle is the act of simply gaining a full awareness of love's presence in a person's life.
I love how narrator (Jesus) explains the Holy Trinity where the Father is God - Atman - the everything - Source. The Son is who we are, we are the children of God and then it's the Holy Spirit which I normally call our Higher Self.
The Holy Spirit's job is to bring us back to God and to help us see through the illusions of the reality that the ego has created for us. The Holy Spirit is created by God to help us find our way back to God and to the truth that everything is Love, including ourselves.
We have free will when we align our will with God's will. Because we are a part of God and we are created in the image of God - as Love. Yet we can also chose to not align ourselves with God and unity and we are allowed to separate ourselves even though this is just an idea and never ever happens in truth. Only in the mind.
Our mind is of God, in fact the entire creation is created from the mind. By aligning ourselves to the mind of God, we are aligning ourselves to the highest and to the truth of who we are.
All of this happens in the mind, through intention.
The ACIM talks a lot about how we much stay vigilant towards the mind, so that we don't create attacks against others or our self, so that we don't separate ourselves.
It reminds us that God loves us and only wants us to be happy, yet when we choose to think badly about others, we create that idea into form. It creates insanity. Yet when we don't trust God, then we don't trust anyone or anything. We have believed ourselves as separate and that creates fear and suffering.
ACIM's solution is always to align with the will and the mind of God, to our truth as the Love that we are.
I haven't read the whole book yet I feel that I receive a lot of alignment just by reading this book. There's a depth to the resonance as to what we are.
It speaks of forgiveness and that everything that is created by the small mind, the ego has no lasting damage because it's an illusion. Everything created by the small mind can be undone. Thus forgiveness is immediate. There is no shame or guilt. There's only Love.
1. A miracle is a correction. It does not create, nor really change at all. It merely looks on devastation, and reminds the mind that what it sees is false. It undoes error, but does not attempt to go beyond perception, nor exceed the function of forgiveness. Thus it stays within time’s limits. Yet it paves the way for the return of timelessness and love’s awakening, for fear must slip away under the gentle remedy it brings.
2. A miracle contains the gift of grace, for it is given and received as one. And thus it illustrates the law of truth the world does not obey, because it fails entirely to understand its ways. A miracle inverts perception which was upside down before, and thus it ends the strange distortions that were manifest. Now is perception open to the truth. Now is forgiveness seen as justified.
3. Forgiveness is the home of miracles. The eyes of Christ deliver them to all they look upon in mercy and in love. Perception stands corrected in His sight, and what was meant to curse has come to bless. Each lily of forgiveness offers all the world the silent miracle of love. And each is laid before the Word of God, upon the universal altar to Creator and creation in the light of perfect purity and endless joy.
4. The miracle is taken first on faith, because to ask for it implies the mind has been made ready to conceive of what it cannot see and does not understand. Yet faith will bring its witnesses to show that what it rested on is really there. And thus the miracle will justify your faith in it, and show it rested on a world more real than what you saw before; a world redeemed from what you thought was there.
5. Miracles fall like drops of healing rain from Heaven on a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures come to die. Now they have water. Now the world is green. And everywhere the signs of life spring up, to show that what is born can never die, for what has life has immortality.
So what do we do? We ask for forgiveness. We ask from guidance to the Holy Spirit (our higher self), we ask for healing from God or correctness so that we can remember again. A return to Love. When we cannot reach it, we ask for help and we open ourselves up to receive. We must take responsibility for our mind as the creator that it is. Our mind is of God and thus God has extended his gifts to you... which is creation. God gives and gives through the extension of creation which means that we are always creating because we are of God, which is creation itself and we are not separate.
The only thing that is not real is the ego and the only thing that we can lose is the ego. Our practice is to be vigilant about how we use our mind, what are we choosing to create?
Are we creating in love or in fear?
To ask for forgiveness and to ask to be aligned to love again so that we can remember our truth. Our truth can only be experienced and never be told. So this is like the old gurus always said, we can't point the way, but you have to walk the path.
So how does it feel to choose love in our every day moments? Is this something you've practiced? For me this practice really feels like it has brought me back to love and to myself again. These last few years have been very challenging to me as well as filled with immense blessings along side the challenges. I feel that I've grown immensely and its interesting because at times I felt like I slipped back into forgetting my truth and yet on the other side coming into deeper alignment again, it's more like a spiral moving upwards. Revisiting themes of love and forgiveness. It's a deepening of love.
One of the most powerful shifts I had this year was when I prayed to God to hep me forgive myself. In that moment something immense shifted and I've felt as if a deep weight lifted from my being. In truth I don't fully remember what I felt guilty about and it doesn't matter. After I forgave myself, I had no grudges against anyone else. It all fell away. Just like that. Peace.
Thank you for reading, so much Love!
Kristina