Kyoto, 2010
“Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.”
– A Course in Miracles
Tag: ACIM
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“There is no order of difficulty in miracles.
One is not “harder” or “bigger” than another. They are all the same.
All expressions of love are maximal.”I won’t share from A Course in Miracles every day, but although I find many lines and exercises in The Course strange, others resonate immediately, like the quote above. Also:
- Miracles as such do not matter. The only thing that matters is their Source, Which is far beyond evaluation
- Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love. The real miracle is the love that inspires them. In this sense everything that comes from love is a miracle. (snip)
- Miracles are a kind of exchange. Like all expressions of love, which are always miraculous in the true sense, the exchange reverses the physical laws. They bring more love both to the giver and the receiver.
[Full list is on Wikipedia] - The miracle is a learning device that lessens the need for time. It establishes an out-of-pattern time interval not under the usual laws of time. In this sense it is timeless.
High Point, North Carolina To this list I will add from my own experience:
- Miracles are like dreams. They have no origin as such. They unpack forward and backward, open on all sides. This is why The Course describes them as expressions of timelessness.
Related material added 3.20.2018:
Sagacity + Love = Serendipity?
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“Take the work seriously, and your self not seriously at all.“
– Judy Dench as quoted by Alan Rickman
I have decided to study The Course in Miracles in 2017. Actually, I’ve been studying it for a few months already.
To be honest, the all-positive, Law of Attraction ‘motivational coach voice’ of some materials has been a stumbling block for me, as well as ACIM’s overtly solely Christian metaphors. But, it can also be helpful at the right time, perhaps like the one I’m in… when pulled to be more outward and receptive.
The best of The Course reminds me of Abhidharma, which is a Buddhist mind training system for learning to see through the solidity of appearances by way of less personal attachment. ACIM’s exercises are unusual and koan-like, but more bothersome; the 16 ACIM exercises I’ve tried so far, have been uncomfortable in a different way.
Actually, let’s face it. I’m seriously resistant to them, but also fascinated by the avenues the exploration is opening, rituals that feel comforting and playful. I remember being terrified to even look at the materials when I was young, since you could only find them in occult shops I was taught that I shouldn’t have even walked into. 🙂
My favorite line of Gabby Bernstein’s The Universe Has Your Back, came from A Course in Miracles): “When you think you’ve surrendered, surrender more.”
Which comes down to a kind of heart longing of, “Not my way but Thine”, with that ‘Thine’ in the language of ACIM being God, or in Gabby’s book Universe (or God interchangeably). For another it might be Inner Self, or Flying Spaghetti Monster. I like simply, Life, but Holy Spirit is also nice, folding back in the innocent faith of my youth.
All I’ve studied over the course of the last few decades leads me feel that a huge number of us have been moving toward non-dualistic ways of thinking for quite some time, away from stark good vs. evil contrasts, leaving a third way open. Spirituality seems to me, a natural part of evolution.
The phrase middle way is sometimes taken to mean a compromise, which I think is farther away from the mark than the transcendent notion of a play dynamic – heaven and earth together.
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“The fact and the particular character of a temporal series are entirely due to the view that is taken on Great Time. This does not exactly mean that time is a subjective phenomenon, because the ‘subject’ in a lower space is also a result of a particular ‘knowing’ of ‘Time’.
But certainly, the observer’s ego is conditioned by the restrictive view that is characteristic of lower spaces. Insofar as the ego is self-protective and reluctant to surrender itself to permit the expression of a wider focal setting, ordinary time conforms to the ego’s restrictions.”
– Time Space and Knowledge
This chapter of Time Space Knowledge is titled The Presence of Time — Liberating Potency and Compelling Patterns. I sat a while with the title, and the phrases inside of it… Presence of Time, Liberating Potency, Compelling Patterns.I played with the rhythms, rearranging the words, “Liberating Presence of Time, Compelling Potency, Potent Time.”
It was fun feeling the ideas… the glow and empowerment of them… reminders that floated up about life situations, ingrained patterns in my scope of self, family. I asked myself, “What is like that now?” and remembered seasons in which I didn’t think I was making life small, just doing my best to accept the way things were. Then I thought of all my seeming rescues… how often some stroke of luck or genius came through, and how hard it was to remember later, what life was like before that change.
I considered the feeling of intentionally forgetting… how no thoughts are bad in and of themselves, or people bad, and how sometimes if I can forget… forget myself, a way of seeing that I haven’t considered may appear… a new texture, or taste I hadn’t fathomed. How greatly changed everything ‘out there’ can seem. S. has said many times, that dropping could be holding in a different way, and A Course in Miracles calls miracles shifts in perception.
I have mused with strange ways of describing ordinary mind/ordinary knowing/ordinary time, and have asked from different stances and angles, what is meant by kinds of mind or mind streams. It is likely something I’ll never stop asking, but without aim toward answers, since answers could close down an enormously rich exploration. I’m addicted to comparing different descriptions of reality because when they collide, sometimes a new universe opens. ‘Ordinary mind’ is about perception, and ‘Knowing’ about reality.
It was many years ago now, standing in a DSW shoe store, that I suddenly realized that I wasn’t thinking. To ‘see’ that ‘I’ wasn’t thinking could be a thought, but it was certainly a different kind of thought than I’d ever experienced before. I felt held by the thought, rather than compelled to follow it along some line. There was revealed a way of mind I didn’t realize I’d been beset by, until relieved.
Matheson Hammock Park (Miami)
~ Singing Gecko 