A COURSE IN MIRACLES Chapter 5 Healing and Wholeness

VI. Time and Eternity 1-6

1. God in His knowledge is not waiting, but His Kingdom is bereft while you wait. All the Sons of God are waiting for your return, just as you are waiting for theirs.  Delay does not matter in eternity, but it is tragic in time.  You have elected to be in time rather than eternity, and therefore believe you are in time.  Yet your election is both free and alterable.  You do not belong in time.  Your place is only in eternity, where God Himself placed you forever.
2. Guilt feelings are the preservers of time.  They induce fears of retaliation or abandonment, and thus ensure that the future will be like the past.  This is the ego’s continuity.  It gives the ego a false sense of security by believing that you cannot escape from it.  But you can and must.  God offers you the continuity of eternity in exchange.  When you choose to make this exchange, you will simultaneously exchange guilt for joy, viciousness for love, and pain for peace.  My role is only to unchain your will and set it free.  Your ego cannot accept this freedom and will oppose it at every possible moment and in every possible way.  And as its maker, you recognize what it can do because you gave it the power to do it.
3. Remember the Kingdom always and remember that you who are part of the Kingdom cannot be lost.  The Mind that was in me is in you, for God creates with perfect fairness.  Let the Holy Spirit remind you always of His fairness and let me teach you how to share it with your brothers.  How else can the chance to claim it for yourself be given you?  The two voices speak for different interpretations of the same thing simultaneously; or almost simultaneously, for the ego always speaks first.  Alternate interpretations were unnecessary until the first one was made. 
4. The ego speaks in judgment, and the Holy Spirit reverses its decision, much as a higher court has the power to reverse a lower court’s decisions in this world.  The ego’s decisions are always wrong, because they are based on the error they were made to uphold.  Nothing the ego perceives is interpreted correctly.  Not only does the ego cite Scripture for its purpose, but it even interprets Scripture as a witness for itself.  The Bible is a fearful thing in the ego’s judgment.  Perceiving it as frightening, it interprets it fearfully.  Being afraid, you do not appeal to the Higher Court because you believe its judgment would also be against you. 
5. There are many examples of how the ego’s interpretations are misleading, but a few will suffice to show how the Holy Spirit can reinterpret them in His Own Light.
6. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap” He interprets to mean what you consider worth cultivating you will cultivate in yourself.  Your judgment of what is worthy makes it worthy for you.[1]

Is it any wonder we have been homesick for that which we cannot find on earth, weary of conflict, strife, and bloodshed, discouraged by our inability to connect and truly know anything or anybody?   In our text reading today Jesus reminds us that this is not our home.  This is not where we belong!  We can wait as long as we want, but until we come home, the Kingdom is incomplete without us just as we are incomplete without the Kingdom.

When we accept the Love of God, we put down our fear of God.  We put down guilt, viciousness, and pain and we pick up joy, love, and peace.  Jesus frees us of the tyranny of ego which keeps us bound in flesh and blood and fear, by demonstrating the truth about God and His Love and Devotion toward Creation. 

You are part of God’s Kingdom and I am part of God’s Kingdom.  We can never be lost.  We belong to God and the Mind that was in Jesus is in us – Jesus had no advantage over us.  God is fair.  He is not going to send some Savior into the world to teach us about our identity Who is superior to us in any way, has unfair advantages, and magic powers that can be used against us.  God does not have favorites.  Getting to heaven is not some kind of unholy contest that depends upon a particular belief system or who is the saintliest of all.  Every single one of us are designed for and destined for Heaven for this is the Will of God.  And this is the gospel of Christ.

The two voices in our minds interprets this quite differently.  The voice of ego always speaks loud, butts in first, and does its best to drown out the Voice for God.  The voice of ego is bossy, condemning, and motivates by fear.  It uses guilt, shame, and threats to get its way.  The voice of ego interprets God as an ego would interpret God – a temperamental deity which is jealous, demands blood sacrifices, and needs constant adoration, flattery, and worship.  

Always remember that it is not the Voice for God which accuses, condemns, and judges!  The Voice for God reverses all the ego’s decisions and interpretations of who and what we are.  Unlike the ego, Holy Spirit always judges for us.  The ego would send us to hell to burn forever; Holy Spirit returns us to God to live forever in joy and peace.  The ego will take scriptures that are meant to uplift and motivate us toward eternal bliss and interpret them in the meanest and most vicious manner possible.  The ego’s purpose is to fill us with fear toward God and Creation.  Being afraid of God, many of us fail to appeal to Him, because we believe the ego’s version of the bloodthirsty, irate, unstable God is the only one there is.  Holy Spirit calls to us through our higher minds and asks us to use our reason, our sanity, our innate goodness and inborn love.  Our higher minds see past the ego’s bluster and blunder.  Holy Spirit reinterprets the ego’s scriptures to one which frees us from its chains. 

Instead of imprisoning our beings in an ongoing cycle of karmic law, of hanging on to the past and projecting it into the future – Holy Spirit reinterprets “As you sow, so shall you reap,” to mean that which we find of worth is what we focus our minds and energies toward, and where we will see the result. 

There is nothing threatening, mean, or unforgiving in this interpretation of “as you sow, so shall you reap.”  It simply means what it says – What we consider worth cultivating, we will cultivate and reap the returns of what was cultivated. 

In my own life, I did my best to overcome social stigma, emotional disorder, and other impediments to learning.  Even though I dropped out of high school, I earned a GED and eventually earned a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and a Master of Science in Education.  Just because I dropped out of high school did not mean that I was doomed to continue reaping a sense of failure when it came to learning.  I could change my mind about myself.  I did not have to accept the ego’s verdict.

Whatever we find worth putting our minds to, our energies will follow.  We can start wherever we are and whenever we are ready to sow what we find worthy.  Never believe that we are fated to reap the bad seeds that we sow.  Bad seeds are simply mistakes.  Mistakes do not define us nor limit us in any way. Our mistakes, reinterpreted by Holy Spirit, teach us to let the ego go and return our minds completely to the Kingdom where we reap eternal love, peace, and joy. 

Tomorrow we will complete the last six paragraphs of “Time and Eternity.”  Today, let us calm our minds and listen for the still, quiet Voice for God which always speaks for love and mercy in the certain peace of our high and holy minds in Christ.

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[1] A Course in Miracles. Chapter Five Healing and wholeness. VI Time and eternity. 1-6.  Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).

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