IV. Teaching and Healing
- What fear has hidden still is part of you. Joining the Atonement is the way out of fear. The Holy Spirit will help you reinterpret everything that you perceive as fearful and teach you that only what is loving is true. Truth is beyond your ability to destroy, but entirely within your ability to accept. It belongs to you because, as an extension of God, you created it with Him. It is yours because it is part of you, just as you are part of God because He created you. Nothing that is good can be lost because it comes from the Holy Spirit, the Voice for creation. Nothing that is not good was ever created, and therefore cannot be protected. The Atonement is the guarantee of the safety of the Kingdom, and the Union of the Sonship is its protection. The ego cannot prevail against the Kingdom because the Sonship is united. In the presence of those who hear the Holy Spirit’s call to be as one, the ego fades away and is undone.
- What the ego makes it keeps to itself, and so it is without strength. Its existence is unshared. It does not die; it was merely never born. Physical birth is not a beginning; it is a continuing. Everything that continues has already been born. It will increase as you are willing to return the unhealed part of your mind to the higher part, returning it undivided to creation. I have come to give you the foundation, so your own thoughts can make you really free. You have carried the burden of unshared ideas that are too weak to increase but having made them you did not realize how to undo them. You cannot cancel out your past errors alone. They will not disappear from your mind without the Atonement, a remedy not of your making. The Atonement must be understood as a pure act of sharing. That is what I meant when I said it is possible even in this world to listen to one Voice. If you are part of God and the Sonship is one, you cannot be limited to the self the ego sees.
- Every loving thought held in any part of the Sonship belongs to every part. It is shared because it is loving. Sharing is God’s way of creating, and yours. The ego can keep you in exile from the Kingdom, but in the Kingdom itself it has no power. Ideas of the spirit do not leave the mind that thinks them, nor can they conflict with each other. However, ideas of the ego can conflict because they occur at different levels and include opposite thoughts at the same level. It is impossible to share opposing thoughts. You can share only the thoughts that are of God and that He keeps for you. And of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. The rest remains with you until the Holy Spirit has reinterpreted them in the light of the Kingdom, making them, too, worthy of being shared. When they have been sufficiently purified, He lets you give them away. The decision to share them is their purification.
- I heard one Voice because I understood that I could not atone for myself alone. Listening to one Voice implies the decision to share It in order to hear It yourself. The Mind that was in me is still irresistibly drawn to every mind created by God, because God’s Wholeness is the wholeness of His Son. You cannot be hurt, and do not want to show your brother anything except your wholeness. Show him that he cannot hurt you and hold nothing against him, or you hold it against yourself. This is the meaning of “turning the other cheek.”
- Teaching is done in many ways, above all by example. Teaching should be healing, because it is the sharing of ideas and the recognition that to share ideas is to strengthen them. I cannot forget my need to teach what I have learned, which arose in me because I learned it. I call upon you to teach what you have learned, because by so doing you can depend on it. Make it dependable in my name because my name is the Name of God’s Son. What I learned I give you freely, and the Mind that was in me rejoices as you choose to hear it.
- The Holy Spirit atones in all of us by undoing, and thus lifts the burden you have placed in your mind. By following Him you are led back to God where you belong, and how can you find the way except by taking your brother with you? My part in the Atonement is not complete until you join it and give it away. As you teach so shall you learn. I will never leave you or forsake you, because to forsake you would be to forsake myself and God Who created me. You forsake yourself and God if you forsake any of your brothers. You must learn to see them as they are, and understand they belong to God as you do. How could you treat your brother better than by rendering unto God the things that are God’s?
- The Atonement gives you the power of a healed mind, but the power to create is of God. Therefore, those who have been forgiven must devote themselves first to healing because, having received the idea of healing, they must give it to hold it. The full power of creation cannot be expressed as long as any of God’s ideas is withheld from the Kingdom. The joint will of the Sonship is the only creator that can create like the Father, because only the complete can think completely, and the thinking of God lacks nothing. Everything you think that is not through the Holy Spirit is lacking.
- How can you who are so holy suffer? All your past except its beauty is gone, and nothing is left but a blessing. I have saved all your kindnesses and every loving thought you ever had. I have purified them of the errors that hid their light and kept them for you in their own perfect radiance. They are beyond destruction and beyond guilt. They came from the Holy Spirit within you, and we know what God creates is eternal. You can indeed depart in peace because I have loved you as I loved myself. You go with my blessing and for my blessing. Hold it and share it, that it may always be ours. I place the peace of God in your heart and in your hands, to hold and share. The heart is pure to hold it, and the hands are strong to give it. We cannot lose. My judgment is as strong as the wisdom of God, in Whose Heart and Hands we have our being. His quiet children are His blessed Sons. The Thoughts of God are with you.[1]
In today’s devotional practice, we completely accept the message of Atonement, we know who and what we are, and we know what we are not! No longer puppets of the ego, fear falls away! The Atonement is our guarantee of safety, Jesus tells us. The ego cannot prevail against us because we hear the call of Holy Spirit to be as one.
Only Atonement heals the mind and makes it one – returning it undivided to Creation. Jesus gives us the basis upon which our own thoughts can free us completely from ego. We all make mistakes. We all have ideas, which we think are best, but simply do not work. Instead of bringing us the happiness, the sense of purpose and meaning that we thought they would, our ideas are mistaken and lead to disappointment, heartache, and sorrow. The memory of our mistakes stay with us. They burden us and make us afraid. We do our best to hide them, cover them up, focus on the mistakes or the mishaps going on around us to distract us from our own sense of guilt and shame. There is no remedy for this except Atonement. There is no therapy in the world that can resolves our guilt and shame. There is no substance that will drown out the accusations of our ego against us. Until we accept our oneness in God, our Brotherhood with Christ, we carry the burden of personal failure with us. We can practice positive self-talk, we can pray all day long, we can do nice things for others, and attend mass faithfully – but we will never feel good enough as long as we think of ourselves as a body, an ego, a human. Our Being is united, automatically forgiven for all mistakes in the flesh, for the flesh is not truth, reality, or in any way created by God.
Jesus tells us in paragraph three that all loving thought belongs to all. When we love, we share – it is God’s way of creating and it is our way of creating. The ego can keep us in a state of deception, but it can never deceive the Kingdom of God. In the Spirit, in oneness, ideas do not leave the mind of those that think them, nor do they conflict with others, because of the oneness and unity. Every idea belongs to all, and all ideas are those of love, of unity, of one for all and all for one.
This is hard for us to imagine because in our ego-controlled minds we hang on tight to our ideas and really resent it when someone “steals” them and calls them their own. Even A Course in Miracles was not exempt from this conflict between two different organizations trying to grab rights to its distribution! In the ego realm, there are many versions of what is right and what is wrong. There have been so-called “holy” wars over how to worship God correctly or by what name we should call Him. People think they have a legitimate right to coerce, control, and even kill other people who do not agree with them. It is impossible to build upon opposing thoughts. When we keep practicing the same traditions, rites, and rituals that our ancestors practiced out of some misguided sense of loyalty, we are simply repeating the same mistakes they made. Repeating the same mistakes they made, we will continue to suffer in much the same way. We are not building upon anything – it is the same old, recycled pain, suffering, and separateness.
Jesus says that until we welcome Holy Spirit to reinterpret conflicting viewpoints in the light of love, understanding and truth, those ideas stay with us. Try as we might to make them true, we are beating a dead horse. They will continue to fail us until we ask God for truth, for unity, for oneness.
When we choose the Voice for God, we have understood the basic concept of salvation. We must share Atonement in order to have Atonement for ourselves. Every mind created by God contributes to the Wholeness of God and His Son – we do not fall into cliques, clans, or church membership and think that we alone have the key to the Kingdom. Wholeness means everybody. Because nobody can hurt or hinder us; we hold nothing against others for when we hold things against others, we hold it against ourselves. Jesus tells us that we literally turn the other cheek when someone attacks us because they can only attack our flesh and the ego in which it symbolizes. Our Being is never attacked, never vulnerable, never at war.
Teaching by example is the best way to get our points across. Sharing ideas and recognizing the strength in sharing is healing. This does not necessarily mean that I share my ideas about the Course with you and therefore strengthen them. It means that I share my ideas and do not call them my own. I do not hold on to them in fear that you will steal them from me and perhaps get as much knowledge as I have or earn more stars in your crown than I do. It means that I do not try to copyright my ideas and make you pay for them or sue you for taking them and using them as your own. We are called to teach what we learn because we learned it – I share what I learned and call upon you to teach what you learned. We can depend upon each other to follow Christ, to do so in His Name, to do as He does. He does not jealously guard His ideas – He shares them. Freely. We rejoice even as Christ does when other choose to hear it and share it with others. We do not seek vainglory for ourselves. We learn how to enjoy our Being by letting all the ego’s jealousy, guardedness, neediness, and hostility toward others go. Our reward is in sharing for sharing is strengthening and growth.
Holy Spirit atones by uniting our minds with the minds of others and with God. No longer burdened with thoughts of being alone and afraid in a universe filled with danger on every side, our Beings are led back to God where we belong. In the healed mind, we would not dream of going without our brothers. We complete Christ’s part in Atonement when we join it and share in His magnanimous mind.
We teach to learn and learn to teach. Do not be afraid of teaching the wrong gospel, of making mistakes, of not having the intellect or the spiritual knowledge to share what we learn. We start with what we have and work with that – we let our egos out of it. If we flub up, Holy Spirit will correct us, and we have learned an important lesson. When our brothers flub up, we forgive them and ask Holy Spirit to correct them. We certainly do not make fun of them, point out how stupid they are, or how unqualified they are to teach the things of God! Ego would have us looking for faults and comparing our credibility with the credibility of others. But when we forsake our brothers in this egotistical way we forsake Jesus, and we forsake the Voice for God. We render our brothers unto God because they are God’s! And Being of God, we love them, support them, and appreciate them because we are one with them. We certainly do not compete with them, play tricks on them, or cast out their name as evil.
Atonement heals our minds by restoring its oneness and unity with all that is God’s. The full power of Creation cannot be expressed by any one of us alone – we must all be restored to the Sonship to create like God because only in completion can we think completely because God’s thinking lacks nothing. Our minds need healed if we still think without the desire for oneness and unity of Holy Spirit. When our minds are healed, we are to teach and heal other minds until Atonement is complete. In other words, focus on healing the separation before getting too carried away by the grander things of God!
Read over the last paragraph of today’s text reading and meditate upon the words of Christ that speak to our innermost Beings assuring us of God’s Love and Devotion. Today share God’s Love in your thoughts, in your words, and in your deeds.
[1] A Course in Miracles. Chapter 5 Healing and wholeness. IV Teaching and healing. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).
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