From A Course in Miracles
1. When you come to the place where the branch in the road is quite apparent, you cannot go ahead. 2 You must go either one way or the other. 3 For now if you go straight ahead, the way you went before you reached the branch, you will go nowhere. 4 The whole purpose of coming this far was to decide which branch you will take now. 5 The way you came no longer matters. 6 It can no longer serve. 7 No one who reaches this far can make the wrong decision, although he can delay. 8 And there is no part of the journey that seems more hopeless and futile than standing where the road branches, and not deciding on which way to go.
2. It is but the first few steps along the right way that seem hard, for you have chosen, although you still may think you can go back and make the other choice. 2 This is not so. 3 A choice made with the power of Heaven to uphold it cannot be undone. 4 Your way is decided. 5 There will be nothing you will not be told, if you acknowledge this.
3. And so you and your brother stand, here in this holy place, before the veil of sin that hangs between you and the face of Christ. 2 Let it be lifted! 3 Raise it together with your brother, for it is but a veil that stands between you. 4 Either you or your brother alone will see it as a solid block, nor realize how thin the drapery that separates you now. 5 Yet it is almost over in your awareness, and peace has reached you even here, before the veil. 6 Think what will happen after. 7 The Love of Christ will light your face, and shine from it into a darkened world that needs the light. 8 And from this holy place He will return with you, not leaving it nor you. 9 You will become His messenger, returning Him unto Himself.
4. Think of the loveliness that you will see, who walk with Him! 2 And think how beautiful will you and your brother look to the other! 3 How happy you will be to be together, after such a long and lonely journey where you walked alone. 4 The gates of Heaven, open now for you, will you now open to the sorrowful. 5 And none who looks upon the Christ in you but will rejoice. 6 How beautiful the sight you saw beyond the veil, which you will bring to light the tired eyes of those as weary now as once you were. 7 How thankful will they be to see you come among them, offering Christ’s forgiveness to dispel their faith in sin.
5. Every mistake you make, your brother will gently have corrected for you. 2 For in his sight your loveliness is his salvation, which he would protect from harm. 3 And you will be your brother’s strong protector from everything that seems to rise between you both. 4 So shall you walk the world with me, whose message has not yet been given everyone. 5 For you are here to let it be received. 6 God’s offer still is open, yet it waits acceptance. 7 From you who have accepted it is it received. 8 Into your hand, joined with your brother’s, is it safely given, for you who share it have become its willing guardian and protector.
6. To all who share the Love of God the grace is given to the givers of what they have received. 2 And so they learn that it is theirs forever. 3 All barriers disappear before their coming, as every obstacle was finally surmounted that seemed to rise and block their way before. 4 This veil you and your brother lift together opens the way to truth to more than you. 5 Those who would let illusions be lifted from their minds are this world’s saviors, walking the world with their Redeemer, and carrying His message of hope and freedom and release from suffering to everyone who needs a miracle to save him.
7. How easy is it to offer this miracle to everyone! 2 No one who has received it for himself could find it difficult. 3 For by receiving it, he learned it was not given him alone. 4 Such is the function of a holy relationship; to receive together and give as you received. 5 Standing before the veil, it still seems difficult. 6 But hold out your hand, joined with your brother’s, and touch this heavy-seeming block, and you will learn how easily your fingers slip through its nothingness. 7 It is no solid wall. 8 And only an illusion stands between you and your brother, and the holy Self you share together.
jlo, this bad-ass mofo just loves scalpelistic. We should violate language more often. I think painful experience has formed all of us to a large extent – the question is just how far we are aware of that and what we do with it. So, yes, my own struggle is in view. Hopefully, my words don’t obstruct access too much to the raw person I am. I suppose on a forum like this we have to think about propriety and constructive debate.
Eric, goddess love you! You have embodied the synthesis of these polarities in your own experience and energised this in your writings. Bravo. My caveat was probably born of surprise. The debate is worth having in my opinion, not just as a caveat to the suggestible, but because I really would like to believe that a meeting of diametrically opposed views is workable.
I feel that hearing a message, whatever the source, should always carry the soothing echo of invitation with it, rather than coercion. All the ideologies oppress via the latter. This shouldn’t have to mean we write off whole schemes of thought/experience that dress up that way.
If that whole Pauline gaff could just step out of its work clothes and into its night gown and share some chilling time in conversation, replete with a bottle of wine or mug of cocoa, while reclining on the sofa; so many more people would feel able to embrace and participate in so much more that builds us up, rather than tearing us apart.
Hey, De Witte, I’m hip to what you’re saying. I agree with the realization that indoctrination is crap. I also Understand this reality too be a-thing of one’s own making. Yours is a highly technical reality that requires precision of mind. Only those with scope of vision, or a capacity for linguistics will come too aid you in your quest. (Personally, I’d look for the smart folk) (This is a fine forum for that) I enjoy your scalpelistic (that will probably drive you mad, my disrespect for the english, or any other, language that we convey) view of folks, But, tell me, where are you at? Spit it out in simpleton. That might serve you well?.!.?
I do indeed Love your words, You’re a bad-ass mother fucker.
Love Peace and Happiness,
Jere
To my knowledge, A Course in Miracles has never been subjected to serious literary or theological criticism. Half D, my sense, after reading every word of the Course and living with in my life for well over 20 years, is that it was written for those indoctrinated by Churchianity, the doctrine of sin and so forth. It is written to reach people who are already in that mode and who would not accept a form of spirituality with any other tone; or from any other professed source. In other words, people who might believe that Buddha is an instrument of Satan.
I am reluctant to advocate the work, because of its old-fashioned nature and terminology like “face of Christ,” which is controversial until you have actually seen, felt and experienced what they are talking about.
I am aware of the issues. The methods that have helped me the most on the level of getting through the day, finding my creative voice, and so on, come from radically different traditions than this, such as Gestalt, and if you’re looking for a place that they are reconciled, presented with a critical journalistic eye, that’s basically what you get in my horoscope. While I consider my approach to be original, I am aware that I am drawing deeply on the inner logic of the Course, and from Gestalt, and from the living tradition of art.
Nowhere does the new testament say you have to be good to be saved. It says you are saved by grace, and that is the constant theme of Paul as well. We are all sinners! Being good is most likely right out of the first grade catechism – a ‘devout’ catholic thing. Now striving at being good isn’t a bad thing, but it certainly weights you down with guilt.
There is a lot of misunderstanding about scripture, which is probably natural given the time in which it was written and the audience for whom it was written. At a time when men were allowed to beat and kill their wives and slaves, Paul was very gently leading them to respect and love – and what a dangerous game he played, speaking to Romans in such a manner – it got him killed in the end. I never thought the PW readers too humanistic to understand that spirit and love are the same. Indeed, I’d guess most of the Pisces folk understand it thoroughly.
carecare7, ideology masquerading as spirituality will prescribe the nature of relations between things and people as being valid IF they are a certain way. Doctrine of Love is one of the classic positions which makes wrong all counterveiling understandings grounded in real human experiences. It is in the same way that the doctrine of forgiveness uncritically suggests that the point is fulfilling the requirement to forgive rather than the compassion of the process of release that a human in a real situation has to bring about in the face of the sheer rawness felt.
The great thing about the traditional theology of incarnation was always that God fully inhabited humanity (we don’t really reflect on what this can truly imply) rather than simply utilising it as a vehicle for some technical redemptive mission – of course, some people want to see us saved more than others do, namely moralists, who think we should be saved because we are so very wicked and deviant – or, if you like, not conforming to traditional power-driven social norms of right and wrong, good and bad, sin and righteousness.
A God who is a victim of his own doctrines, such that he has to fulfill a satisfactory theological scheme, rather than actually experience and embrace the human condition in a meaningful way, is a strange concept for one that has become so culturally dominant. One thinks of the real suffering of small children, who get destroyed when young, then unable to process and deal with pain, get no support but plenty of subsequent ignominy and judgment and maligning for their anger re a life blighted and who never recover meaningful life chances – many becoming ‘personality disordered’.
These ‘bad’ people would be compassionately felt by the heart of a loving God but would be judged eternally reprobate and intrinsically flawed by the proprietors of the purist doctrines that inscribe ‘truths’ in a trite, privileged way that denies, as you say carecare, human experience and the human body.
I believe we must harbour respect, even for problematic ideologies, because they can offer something. It is usually the way they are appropriated that is problematic. However, I’m with carecare that it is very difficult to stomach the oppressive nature of how these language games present. One thing is for sure, God(dess) did not invent ideology, people did. Now that’s a human failing, if ever there was one!!
Half De Witte, I was thinking along the same lines when I read this. I have had enough of the separation of spirituality and the human physical experience. I don’t ascribe to Paulianity either and I cannot stomach the discourse, writings or talk that espouses any of it.
One thing I have seen that mimics the duality of Paulianity but within the “new age” comminuty is the over-emphasis on being positive light workers without any negativity at all. This is another duality that refuses to recognize something the Hopi people have been practicing forever; there must be balance and imbalance, dark and light, positive light workers and negative critics because the latter point out the stuff we all need to work on and get our anger up so we have the strength to make the changes needed to DO the light work. Sweetness and light are nice, but without the critical negative folks that point the way, what would the sweetness and light do but scatter their good energies so much as to be useless?
For me, it is one thing to see and acknowledge dualities in life, it is another to ascribe “good” to one type and “bad” to another type. If you ask me, the entire justification for Paulianity is that exclusivity it confers among its members; they feel like they are the “in” group and everyone that doesn’t do it THEIR way is the “out” group. This breeds superiority and smugness, exclusion and bad treatment of the “other.” Competition between the dualities makes us weaker, not stronger. Humans have a herd mentality but dualities like Christianity/Paulianity serve to divide us; it is a way we destroy ourselves.
The first paragraph here is extremely illuminating!
However, after that, I find myself confused! The relationship between ‘reality’ and the language we use to describe it, is, shall we say, ramified.
The theological style is of a type that the Apostle Paul would be proud of – a radically dualistic (anything BUT humanistic) understanding of humanity’s relationship to the divine. Now, this kind of discourse can easily be looked at as a language game – or if you like (and to use the description of theologian, George Lindbeck, in his book The Nature of Doctrine) doctrine is a kind of grammar used by certain cultural-linguistic groups as an identifier of operational ‘normativity’ with specific groups/situations.
One of the major problems with this type of language is precisely its resonance with Pauline Christianity – a modality which posits an inherent dualism of the old, sinful race, in the pattern of Adam and the new race (new man), headed up under Christ, as a redeemed community of believers (in the Pauline orthodoxy).
Basically, this theological style is intolerant of all other modes of divining or sense-making reality. Even if an individual is attempting to utilise it eclectically, as above, the consequence is to reinforce the dualistic bind. That bind involves judging everything of human origin (including science, reason and the eastern-originated awareness spiritualities) as base or fallen/corrupt. All non-orthodox attempts at spirituality are condemned by the Pauline-type scheme as intrinsically sinful because they emanate from the fallen Adamic-line rather than the redeemed, Christ-line.
Make no mistake, you don’t get to be grafted into the Christ-line unless you are a fully paid up believer/subscriber to that hegemonic model, with the lifestyle choices of the purity ethic that go with that.. so Astrology is out, polyamory debauchery, divorce and remarrying stumbling block etc.
There is no way to square that circle. Most people who are not ‘Christian’ in the sense implied by the language used are, in my experience, often trying to acquire some credibility for their own scheme, as if they are trying to recruit acceptance (struggling for acceptance after scourging judgment) “I’m a Christian really, just a bit alternative”.
Sorry, but the bloodhound bigot will always sniff out your liberal tendencies and will then condemn you as an apostate for trying to mimic the true gospel (“the devil dresses as an angel of light” etc).
I’m currently wrestling with whether any kind of rapprochement is possible with such schemes. Even if it is possible (Nietzsche said ‘no’ to such an extent that he attempted to disarm the implicit threat/fear of eternal condemnation by adopting an Antichrist persona), my feeling is that it is better to demythologise language of this kind, for if we don’t, vulnerable folk inevitably get harmed, because they lack the ability to deal with the grey areas of the human condition – grey areas that full blown biblical orthodoxy, has no interest in addressing and which allows vulnerable people to hide their felt insecurities behind a veil of eternal guarantees.
Thank you Eric. This really puts me in my place (in a good way, ultimately). When i meditate on how such simple wisdom can strike me and run off with so little soaking in (like i’m human hardpan) it gives me a perspective on how much work i need to do.
It’s like walking out of a performance of Shakespeare, it leaves me…
Gratefully Humbled,
-Len
I am besides myself to see this in your blog.
I have just started my own CIM and even though my Aries “Fast Mind” wants to skip immediately to the lessons, I have decided to have a go to the beginning, starting with Atonement.
Fascinating read but God, it makes me tired. Lots of food for thought. Ah, the synchronicity… 🙂
~elle
“Peace is a natural heritage of spirit. 2. Everyone is free to refuse to accept his inheritance, but he is not free to establish what his inheritance is. 3. The problem everyone must decide is the fundamental question of authorship. 4. All fear comes ultimately, and sometimes by way of very devious routes, from the denial of Authorship. 5. The offense is never to God, but only to those who deny Him. 6. To deny his Authorship is to deny yourself the reason for your peace, so that you see yourself only in segments. 7. This strange perception is the authority problem.”
This made me think of the song by the Beatles, Come Together, and particularly this middle verse:
“He wear no shoeshine he got toe-jam football
He got monkey finger he shoot coca-cola
He say “I know you, you know me”
One thing I can tell you is you got to be free
Come together right now over me.”
Hey, I’m a-gonna try less of my angst filled navel gazing that can paralyze me and instead learn to dance with my sisters and brothers. Like an dancer called her program in last night Nuit Blanche, “Dance Like Nobody’s Watching!”
😉
Blessings galore on my fellow Wavers.
Thanks for this wonderful reminder Eric! I had exactly come to the same conclusion today, after a day and night of fear regarding this flu vaccine. What an evil web of illusion we have spun. I’m thinking of the way GOO GONE works. Splatter a little goo gone on the web, and watch it dissolve. If only we had a little dab of faith in our real selves.
ef, how did you know it was just the time for this? exactly. sp
Thank you, too all who understand. (The highest vibration crosses All time and space.)
It has always been us who creates space, time is the construct we lay it down upon.
To all the soul-trippers who envision a more beautiful world, Friends are out there, in the ether, just know yourself well before you start “accepting” the energies that abound, only that which is meant for you will ever find it’s way too you. And, when you open to see, you will know.
Utilize yourself to your highest potential, (it truly doesn’t matter eitherwise!) We are the God’s and Goddesses’ that have been spoken of in text and hand-me-down throughout the ages. It’s merely a method of grasping your own divinity.
I could write forever, But.. Thanks for letting me spew forth some concepts that have been struggling on the “back burner” realm! (I do believe it’s time for us to integrate, not sure how to go about on the personality-centered reality chain, soul is pretty freakin’ easy!)
A bow and exit, Love ya,
Jere