A Course in Miracles is meant to be used to help you get in touch with the Holy Spirit so that the Spirit can help undo your belief in specifics. ACIM is not meant to be used as an intellectual understanding to metaphysically gloss over specific problems that are still believed in.
Self-Concepts
Mastery Through Love Full Talk
Mastery Through Love — Everything that you perceive is the self-concept. The stars, the body, the trees, the cosmos, it’s all your making. Enlightenment occurs through mastery of love and in order to return to love we must forgive all of these ideas of what we think we are. This talk is a great aid for understanding what the self-concept is and how we can regain the awareness of love’s presence.
Family Relationships, Responsibility, and Guilt
The ego has set up many different kinds of self-concepts and roles to keep us trapped, including identification with family relationships and with the body. The only responsibility we have is for our state of mind, we are not responsible for people, animals, debt, etc. If we give ourselves over to the Holy Spirit and following His guidance, the Spirit will handle all of the needs we seem to have in miraculous ways while we unwind our mind back to God. All things will be used in this unwinding, including family relationships. “The whole purpose of life is to wake up from this dream of this world. The ego would have you believe that you exist in this world and you have to attain and achieve certain things in your lifetime. And all of education and learning is based on learning more, but everything in this world is backward and upside down. When you think you advance in this world you are really falling back. And when you think your life is completely falling apart, you are actually opening your heart. So actually, there are always miracles and there are always blessings. The ego invented linear time, and God only knows eternity. So, past and present and future are part of the trick.”
People Are Thoughts
People are thoughts in the mind, they are not really people. People do not have their own private minds and private thoughts. And they cannot seem to exist outside of the One Mind. A Course in Miracles states that at no single instant does the body exist at all, it is always remembered or anticipated. It is the fiction of identity as a person that has to be forgiven, and that’s it. You can see as many thoughts as you want. You can watch those thoughts come by, come and go in your awareness. The ones that seem to be dead, the ones that seem to be living..there’s no difference. It’s artificial, birth and death. And responsibility, there’s only one that ACIM teaches us, and that’s to accept the Atonement.
Heal the Sick and Raise the Dead
Part of the spiritual journey is to heal the beliefs in sickness, pain and death. These beliefs can feel very ingrained to a mind that’s identified with the body. It can seem frightening to take a closer look at these thoughts when we’d rather avoid them. When faced with thoughts of death it can seem intensely fearful, our instant reaction can be to distract away from the fear, but these can be used as mind expanding experiences. In handing all of our thoughts over around sickness and death we can let the Holy Spirit interpret and heal our perception around these beliefs to free our mind from suffering.
Plan Bs or Present Trust?
Jesus will guide us so our journey is smooth and joyful. We only feel pain and sacrifice when we resist. Plan Bs are resistance, used to support the self-concept rather than the Christ Self. Yet the Holy Spirit and Jesus show us that trust is justified. Are we willing to trust so much that we let go of our plan Bs? Our problem is that first we decide what we want, and then we ask for guidance. The asking needs to come first. When we are identified with a self-concept we don’t know our best interests; we are completely lost and need the help of the Holy Spirit. Thankfully, that help is available to us anytime we ask for it
Sexual Repression & Promiscuity
The Spirit will unwind our mind from all the sexual repression and denial that has gone on, and it will use symbols in a highly individualized way depending on each person’s patterns. For example, one who has been very sexually promiscuous in the past may very well be Guided to be celibate for a time. On the other hand, one who has repressed their sexuality may be Guided to start having more sexual experiences which undo old ideas about what sexuality means. In either case…