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Reprinted from_Healing the Cause by
Michael Dawson. Published by Findhorn Press, Scotland.
ACIM Summary chart
"You may be surprised to hear how very different is reality from
what you see."(T348; T-l8.I.5:1) Our senses report to us a
seemingly real and substantial world. The Course informs us
however, that we spend all our sleeping and waking time in a
dream of seeming separation from God. Our true nature is still
spirit, as God created us, and will be eternally. God is
described as perfect, limitless, formless, eternal and
changeless and so therefore His Creation, the Christ or Sonship,
must also be. Nothing in our universe can be described by any of
these words and therefore it cannot have been created by God. We
are ideas in the mind of God and as ideas we cannot leave the
mind of God. This perfect unity of God and Christ is Heaven and
nothing can threaten this.
For reasons we cannot understand, a thought of separation from
God, which the Course calls the ego, entered the collective mind
of the Sonship. This idea, at which we "forgot to laugh", stated
that we could take the place of God and become the Creator.
God's answer to this was the creation of the Holy Spirit in our
mind to correct this "tiny mad idea" of separation.
Choosing not to listen to the Voice for God, we experienced an
overwhelming sense of sin at what we thought we had
accomplished. From this act of sin came guilt and the fear of
God's punishment. Our minds became split into the wrong mind of
the ego, the right mind of the Holy Spirit and the sleeping Son
of God (the decision maker) who has now to decide who to listen
to. The ego part counsels us that we cannot survive the avenging
anger of God as represented by the presence of the Holy Spirit
in our mind. Out of fear, we listen and identify with the ego's
counsel and project the thought of separation out of our mind as
an image. This image is the physical universe where we can now
hide from God's anger and our guilt.
A veil of forgetfulness falls over our decision and this
illusory world appears very real to us. Yet we are still safe in
heaven although lost in our dream of exile. So powerful is this
illusion that we could not awaken without the help of the Holy
Spirit. Our body now seems a reality and not spirit which vision
would reveal to us. The ego teaches us to deny our guilt and
project it onto others. Our guilt (self-hate) now seems to be
created by people and circumstances outside ourselves. We now
feel justified in feeling anger towards others and attack in
self-defence becomes a necessity (special hate relationships).
Feeling a great lack within us, the ego counsels us to find
people who can fulfil our imagined needs - security, sex, money
career etc. (special love relationships).
To awaken from this dream and regain our lost vision, we need to
undo our belief in separation from God. The Holy Spirit's plan
for our awakening is called the Atonement (correction of
perception). We begin to learn that the world is but a neutral
mirror to the beliefs in our mind. No person or event has the
power to give or take our peace from us. When we get disturbed
about someone or something "out there" in the world we are only
seeing a projection of some part of our mind that is not
forgiven.
If we can have the "little willingness" to allow the Holy
Spirit's counsel of forgiveness to enter our mind we can begin
the journey of undoing separation by joining with others. We
forgive by first removing our projections from the world and
then bringing them back to our mind where they originated. Now
we have the opportunity to heal our mind by ceasing to judge its
ego content. It is our self-judgment that prevents our mind
being healed by the Holy Spirit. Guilt demands punishment, not
healing.
As we learn to stop judging ourselves we allow the ever present
love of the Holy Spirit to shine away the clouds of guilt in our
mind. This shift of perception from the ego's world of
separation and attack, to the Holy Spirit's counsel of joining
and forgiveness is called a miracle. As we practice forgiveness
in our relationships, we start to undo the guilt that covers the
memory of God's love in our mind. We begin to see that we have
not been running away from God's anger, but from God's love. To
allow the awareness of God's love back into our mind will cause
our ego to disappear, and this is our greatest fear.
Relationships become classrooms in which we learn to forgive
ourselves by forgiving others (holy relationships). Jesus is the
greatest example to us in teaching this lesson of forgiveness.
Increasingly, we realise that when people attack us through
fear, they are really asking for our love. Thus we begin to
allow the Holy Spirit to transform our world from the prison of
the ego to a teaching device that will awaken us from the dream
of separation and allow us to enter the real world of vision.
With the reawakening in our mind of the knowledge of who we
really are, we will walk this world in complete peace with an
inner joy that nothing can take from us. We will now perceive
everyone as our brothers and sisters whose reality is eternal
spirit and to whom we extend the love of the Holy Spirit.
See also "What it Says" from Preface to A Course in Miracles
A further summary of the Course by Kenneth Wapnick may be read at his website