A Course in Miracles on The Inner Teacher
The mythology of A Course in Miracles begins with "the tiny mad idea." The tiny mad idea is the idea that you, as Christ, the Son of God, separated from your Father. Separation from the love and oneness of God leads to a sense of lack and incompleteness in the Son, who then turns to the ego in search of love, abundance and wholeness.
With exuberance, the ego presents its case to the Son for separation from God; the Holy Spirit remains calm and silent. The ego advises the Son that he can maintain his separate, individual existence and glorify his specialness independent of God. Still, the Holy Spirit remains serene and quiet. The Son weighs the evidence and decides in favor of the ego for individuality, specialness and separation from God.
Having made his decision for independence, specialness and separation from God, the Son begins to feel a sense of sin, guilt and fear: Sin of his separation from God, guilt over his selfish desire for specialness, and fear of loss and retribution from God for choosing against Him.
To relieve the pain of separation, the ego makes a world of bodies onto which it projects the sense of sin, guilt and fear so the Son can maintain his specialness and be free of the pain of separation. By making a world and projecting the sin, guilt and fear onto it, the true source of the Son's pain (his decision to be separate) is forgotten and hidden in the world behind the veil of Self-forgetfulness and denial.
The miracle, forgiveness and the Atonement remove the veil of Self-forgetfulness, undo the separation and remind the Son of his true Identity as the Son of God; not the son of the ego.
Behind the veil of Self-forgetfulness, problems appear to be in the body and world; therefore, solutions appear to be in the body and world. "Magic" is the term the Course uses for solutions sought in the body and world. Problems are in the mind, and solutions are in the mind. The miracle facilitates a shift from focusing on the body and world to focusing on the mind where the Son can choose again (for the ego or the Holy Spirit).
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The Holy Spirit is our communication link to God. The Holy Spirit is placed in our mind to be a gentle reminder of God's love for us and to guide us home to Heaven. We can hide God's Will under the ego's thought system of separation, but we cannot destroy God's Will of oneness. This is the Atonement principle: the separation never happened, and the love of God within us is totally unaffected.
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When we choose the ego, we are guided by the voice of fear. When we choose the Holy Spirit, we are guided by the Voice for love.
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We are to be vigilant and watchful of our thoughts of judgment, condemnation, separation and specialness, and bring them to the light of the Holy Spirit's love to help purify our mind. When we are not at peace we are to stop and ask the Holy Spirit for guidance to help us see with the vision of Christ. Turning to the Holy Spirit and away from the ego is a process that happens over time.
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Every time you meet someone it is a Holy encounter because it offers you the opportunity to recognize the projections of your guilt that you placed upon the other, and forgive it. The way we remember the truth of who we are is by seeing the face of Christ in someone else. If I want to know which teacher I chose, the ego or the Holy Spirit, I watch what I am feeling and thinking about others. If I do not feel love and peace then I have chosen the ego, and I must choose again. Forgiveness of others leads me back to my mind where the original conflict was born in my decision to be separate from the love of God.
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Knowledge is the synonym for love, truth, reality and Heaven. Our motivation for learning this course is the peace that comes when we are free of all conflict and pain. The root of all conflict and pain is the ego's conflict with God. When we have true Self Knowledge our conflict and pain is released and we experience our natural state of peace. In our world of conflict, peace comes through forgiveness. We are afraid of Self Knowledge, forgiveness and peace because we are terrified of the loss of our special, independent existence — which can only exist in self-ignorance, blame and conflict.
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In the Course, Jesus is not the historical figure we think of as a man with a body living in the world. Jesus is a symbol of the perfect love and wholeness of God and represents our Identity with Him. Jesus is the presence of God's love in our mind.
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When we choose to turn to Jesus and the Holy Spirit they help us overcome our fear, and experience the love and peace of God. Forgiveness of those with whom we believe we are in conflict facilitates the realization of our oneness with God and our experience of peace.
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We join with the reflection of God's oneness by joining with Jesus who represents God's love and wholeness in our mind. By joining with Jesus and the Holy Spirit, we realize we share with our brothers the same Identity with God. We also share the same insanity of the ego, and further, we share the same interest of awakening from our dream of separation. With the help of Jesus and the Holy Spirit we are to remember that our identity with our brothers and with Christ is one.
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The ego does not love us because it does not know us. The ego only knows we have the power to choose to identify with it, thereby sustaining its existence; or to choose against identifying with it, thereby dissolving it. That is why the ego is always suspicious and vicious (paranoid, neurotic and psychotic) — it fears its own dissolution.
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Turning to the Holy Spirit or Jesus rather than the ego facilitates our waking up from the painful dream of separation. With the help of the Holy Spirit you look on your brothers through the eyes of forgiveness, innocence and love. With the help of the ego you look on your brothers through the eyes of sin, guilt and fear. When you look out you see the world you made within. Within and without are the same. The guide you turn to is your decision.
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All speech, behavior and action in the world are either expressions of love or calls for love; this is the Holy Spirit's judgment. When you turn to Him instead of the ego, it is your judgment; and the beginning of the end of the world of pain you made, and the beginning of your perception of the real world. The real world is a reflection of the wholeness and love of God.
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Love is the one and only judgment and response of the Holy Spirit. By choosing the Holy Spirit as our guide, love becomes our one and only response to all our brothers in the world we made.
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Happy dreams are the corrections for the nightmares of sin, guilt and fear. Happy dreams are expressions of the holy instant in the real world when we choose innocence, forgiveness and love instead of the ego's nightmare of guilt, blame and hate. As we choose the guidance of the Holy Spirit in the holy instant, the light of the real world begins to be revealed.
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True perception is the vision of the Holy Spirit. To perceive truly we must look through the eyes of the Holy Spirit Who sees everyone equally in the light of God's all-inclusive love. As we bring the darkness to the light, all is seen as either an expression of love or a call for love through the eyes of Christ.
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When we bring our illusions to the Holy Spirit, we realize that everything we believed about ourselves and the world is false, and that in truth we are all Sons of God — this is the miracle. The miracle establishes that we have dreamed a dream, and what we dreamed is not true. When we look through the eyes of the miracle or Christ we realize there is only one problem: we chose to identify with the ego and its sin, guilt and fear; rather than the Holy Spirit and its forgiveness, innocence and love.
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As Sons of God we have the power to choose to identify with the ego and its guilt, or the Holy Spirit and its love. But our true Identity remains unaffected. Love is eternal.
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As we shift back and forth from the special relationship to the holy relationship we may feel a sense of disruption and fluctuation in our relationships. One day we may feel love and forgiveness toward others, the next day we may feel resentment and anger. Our purpose is to continue to turn to the Holy Spirit for guidance to learn the lessons offered to us through relationships in our daily lives.
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When we consciously bring the darkness of guilt to the light of forgiveness, and see it through the Holy Spirit's vision of love, we begin to wake up to the truth of our Identity with the innocence of Christ.
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The motivation for learning this Course is to experience peace and happiness.
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Proof that you have learned and understood this Course is in your experience of perfect peace.
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We give the world meaning through the purpose we choose for it. When we choose the Holy Spirit as our teacher, we see the world as a classroom in which we learn forgiveness as a means to awakening to the truth of our Identity as Christ. When we choose the ego as our teacher, we see the world as a prison and a battleground where we live in fear, conflict and hate; and we remain identified with the body, asleep in our nightmare of separation.
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As we are awakening from the dream, our perception changes, not necessarily the characters or behaviors in the dream. The purpose we assign to characters in our dream determines our perception of them. The characters remain the same, our purpose for them changes, and thus our perception and experience of others changes.
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With the Holy Spirit as our teacher the purpose of our whole world of special relationships is to serve as a classroom to learn forgiveness and acceptance of the Atonement. The Holy Spirit helps you as the Son of God, the decision maker, the dreamer of the dream, to wake up from your nightmare and realize the truth of your Identity as Christ, the one Son of God.
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From the PDF Book - Notes on the Text of ACIM Condensed Version by Stephen Wingate
Paperback Available on Amazon - Condensed Version
Paperback Available on Amazon - Full Version
