12. How Many Teachers of God are Needed to Save the World?
1. The answer to this question is – one. One holy perfect teacher, whose learning is complete, suffices. This one, sanctified and redeemed, becomes the Self who is the Son of God. He who was always wholly spirit now no longer sees himself as a body, or even as in a body. Therefore he is limitless. And being limitless, his thoughts are joined with God’s forever and ever. His perception of himself is based upon God’s judgment, not his own. Thus does he share God’s Will and bring his thoughts to still deluded minds. He is forever one, because he is as God created him. He has accepted Christ, and he is saved.
2. Thus does the son of man become the Son of God. It is not really a change; it is a change of mind. Nothing external alters, but everything internal now reflects only the Love of God. God can no longer be feared, for the mind sees no cause for punishment. God’s teachers appear to be many, for that is what is the world’s need. Yet being joined in one purpose, and one they share with God, how could they be separate from each other? What does it matter if they then appear in many forms? Their minds are one; their joining is complete. And God works through them now as one, for that is what they are.
3. Why is the illusion of many necessary? Only because reality is not understandable to the deluded. Only very few can hear God’s Voice at all, and even they cannot communicate His messages directly through the Spirit which gave them. They need a medium through which communication becomes possible to those who do not realize that they are spirit. A body they can see. A voice they understand and listen to, without the fear that truth would encounter in them. Do not forget that truth can come only where it is welcomed without fear. So do God’s teachers need a body, for their unity could not be recognized directly.
4. Yet what makes God’s teachers is their recognition of the proper purpose of the body. As they advance in their profession, they become more and more certain that the body’s function is but to let God’s Voice speak through it to human ears. And these ears will carry to the mind of the hearer messages that are not of this world, and the mind will understand because of their source. From this understanding will come the recognition, in this new teacher of God, of what the body’s purpose really is; the only use there really is for it. This lesson is enough to let the thought of unity come in, and what is one is recognized as one. The teachers of God appear to share the illusion of separation, but because of what they use the body for, they do not believe in the illusion despite appearances.
5. The central lesson is always this; that what you use the body for it will become to you. Use it for sin or for attack, which is the same as sin, and you will see it as sinful. Because it is sinful it is weak, and being weak, it suffers, and it dies. Use it to bring the Word of God to those who have it not, and the body becomes holy. Because it is holy it cannot be sick, nor can it die. When its usefulness is done it is laid by, and that is all. The mind makes this decision, as it makes all decisions that are responsible for the body’s condition. Yet the teacher of God does not make this decision alone. To do that would be to give the body another purpose from the one that keeps it holy. God’s Voice will tell him when he has fulfilled his role, just as it tells him what his function is. He does not suffer either in going or remaining. Sickness is now impossible for him.
6. Oneness and sickness cannot coexist. God’s teachers choose to look on dreams awhile. It is a conscious choice. For they have learned that all choices are made consciously, with full awareness of their consequences. The dream says otherwise, but who would put his faith in dreams once they are recognized for what they are? Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God’s teachers. They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see. They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful. Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. And it is this God teachers acknowledge as behind the dream, beyond all seeming and yet surely theirs.[1]
There is only one of us – one holy teacher whose learning is complete in Christ. We may appear to be many, we come from all over the world, we look different, we talk different, we walk different paths – but we are one for we are not our bodies. We walk in the Spirit of Sonship because we are the Sonship.
In this beautiful way Jesus teaches us how – through time – the son of man becomes the Son of God. It is a becoming that takes a complete change of mind. The mind changes from fearing God and all things of the Spirit to loving God and cherishing all things of the Spirit. We change from being motivated and manipulated by the outer world to being motivated and directed by the Spirit within. When we stop drowning out the voice of our Inner Self, once we begin to trust in the Voice of God within us, when we learn to trust in That instead of the chatter and babble and clamors of the world, we become what we always were. All the false stuff falls away and there is our true Being and that beautiful Self is Son of God, at one with Christ and one with all of God’s Teachers.
We have no quarrel with anyone or anything. We stop going into defense. We stop ranting and raving. When we stop quarreling about our differences; we start focusing upon only that which makes us One. All that other stuff is proven meaningless. It is the chaff that is separated from the wheat and swept away. There is no sorrow in seeing it go; there is no weeping and gnashing of teeth, it is simply a matter of letting go of all that is not Spirit and Life.
As this process takes time, along the way we will say and do things that contradict the Voice for God within. We will make mistakes. We will run into teachers who seem to be sharing a completely different gospel than the one we have committed ourselves to. We will be tempted to argue and go into attack and defense. We will be tempted to snub those who do not appreciate our work or respect our call. Count it all joy. This is the way we learn, and this is the way we teach others. We make mistakes and we forgive ourselves just as we are asked to forgive others. Let every mistake you make teach you to teach others how to forgive yourself – without shame, without self-reproach, without discouragement and faithlessness, but only with the deepest commitment and the highest regard for the Voice for God within.
There is absolutely nothing to prove to anyone in the outer world. There is no certification by other teachers of God that is worthy to pronounce you as one with them. We have one purpose, and in that purpose we are joined in Spirit no matter what it looks like or feels like in the flesh. We cannot be separate from one another; as teachers of God, we are called out of the delusion that would deceive us into believing we can.
The reality of Spirit is not understandable to those deluded by the perceptual world. Jesus tells us that there is a small percentage of people who can hear God’s Voice at all. And for those of us who do hear God’s Voice within, there are few of us who truly trust in it or who will share it. For me personally it has taken my whole life to finally realize it is the only thing that is real about me, it is the only thing about me that is worthwhile, it is the only thing about me that means anything at all. Before this, it was my guilty secret, it was my madness, it was my curse. I spent many decades of my life trying my best to drown it out, to become involved in the world, to find meaning in relationships, in my passions and in my gifts, in this one thing, and then that other thing. Because I was afraid of God’s Voice within, there was no way for me to know that it was my true voice.
This is the dilemma we all face in the world. We are one, but we cannot communicate as one until we stop being afraid of the Spirit and recognize that in the Spirit realm there can be only Love, Goodness, Peace, and Joy. There can not be an evil spirit, for Spirit is one. Evil must have a form. A spirit cannot “attack” another spirit, for spirit, being one would not and could not divide and attack itself. The only reason Spirit would ever take form is either to separate to attack or, in the case of Christ, to reach those who are still confused about their true identity and are afraid to communicate with Spirit directly without the interference of flesh.
In your meditative reading today, spend some time with paragraph four and ask Holy Spirit to show you the proper use of your body and the proper attitude to take toward the bodies of others. The more advanced we become as teachers of God the more we recognize that we are Spirits, not flesh. The puny, selfish, temporal pleasures of the flesh lose their hold upon us as we become Christ and as Christ becomes us. Our bodies serve only as channels through which God’s Voice speaks. As long as you remain afraid to go within and trust the Voice for God within, you will be more inclined to listen to a human voice because it comes from a human vessel much like your own. Our role as God’s teachers is to be the Voice for God for those who are still afraid of the Christ within, for those who have learned to fear the Spirit, for those who have been put-off by the hateful, fearful doctrines of the ego-based religions of the world.
Our desire, our willingness, our commitment to learn and to be God’s Voice is what makes us one – not our outward appearances. We do not wear the same style of clothes; we do not have rules against tattoos. Teachers of God do not judge each other on individual allowances and extravagances of the flesh. Holy Spirit will use any thing and anybody for salvation. If there is something about me that needs adjusting, Holy Spirit will speak to me about it in my heart, through your voice, or through an illustration in my daily life. To be a teacher of God, we simply dedicate our earthly forms to That which supersedes them. And when we do this properly, our health and well-being are guaranteed to us for that which is devoted entirely to God is blessed by God. For in the unity of spirit, there is no fear nor sickness, there is no pain nor sorrow, no disease, and no death. When the body is no longer needed it is simply laid aside with no fuss and no fanfare.
Why would we give it a second thought? Why would we want to take flesh and bones with us, if we were not afraid of Him Who makes us one? Let us have no attachment to anything from the sensory world, for nothing in this realm or about this realm could withstand the eternal Oneness of God.
[1] A Course in Miracles. Manual for Teachers. 12. How many teachers of God are needed to save the world? Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).
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