A Course In Miracles - Chapter 2, Section VII

ACIM is read one section at a time. It is a guidebook leading us back to our true natures, as we open to the awareness of love's presence. All quoted material is from A Course in Miracles, copyright ©1992, 1999, 2007 by the Foundation for Inner Peace, publisher, and the copyright holder. This material is used with permission. (Foundation for Inner Peace, 448 Ignacio Blvd #306 Novato, CA 94949 USA).

Glossary-Index for a Course In Miracles, 8th edition, Kenneth Wapnick, Ph.D.

Music: Ben Sound

Transcript

Hi,

I'm Teresa Hubbard.

Welcome back to our continued reading of the text to A Course in Miracles.

We continue today in Chapter 2,

The Separation and the Atonement.

Section 7,

Cause and Effect.

To summarize my takeaways,

In Section 7 of Chapter 2,

We are reminded of a concept that we learned already,

That we cannot serve two masters.

Nothing and everything cannot coexist.

Just as darkness disappears when we turn on the light,

Fear abolishes when we choose love.

To believe one is to deny the other.

Yet what we believe will be true for us.

In this section,

Jesus lovingly reminds us that we do not guard our thoughts carefully enough.

The law of cause and effect,

The most fundamental law,

Is that our thoughts create the world we see.

Both miracles and fear come from our thoughts.

Choosing fear causes us to miscreate,

Which causes us pain.

Choosing a miracle abolishes fear,

Which opens us to love.

The conflict then is between love and fear.

Fear is really nothing,

While love is everything.

But attempting to resolve fear,

By mastery of it,

Is useless,

Since fear is just a creation of our egos,

An illusion that does not really exist.

The resolution lies entirely on our mastery of love.

The corrective procedure then is to recognize only temporarily that there is a problem,

Which establishes a state of mind in which the atonement can be accepted without delay.

Accepting the atonement is to accept the truth,

Which is a detour from fear and a return to love.

I invite you to keep a few things in mind as you listen to the reading.

The Course uses male pronouns,

Yet this is simply a way of pointing to the spiritual being,

Having no gender.

The Course is written in first person,

And although not introduced directly to the reader,

It becomes clear that the words are from Jesus,

Often quoting from the Bible.

The Course uses traditional Christian terms in a non-traditional manner.

These words are simply pointers to truth,

Nothing more.

A few definitions of terms you'll hear within the reading.

Atonement The Holy Spirit's plan of correction,

Healing our minds from the earthly world of illusion to God's world of truth.

Holy Spirit The communication link between God and us,

Bridging the gap between the mind of Christ and our human minds.

Christ The self that God created by extension of His Spirit.

It represents the potential within each of us.

Miracle The expression of the atonement.

It's the change in mind that shifts our perception,

Transcending the laws of this world to reflect the laws of God.

The miracle provides the means to heal our own minds and the minds of others.

And now,

On to the reading.

A Course in Miracles Chapter 2 The Separation and the Atonement Section 7 Cause and Effect You may still complain about fear,

But you nevertheless persist in making yourself fearful.

I have already indicated that you cannot ask me to release you from fear.

I know it does not exist,

But you do not.

If I intervened between your thoughts and their results,

I would be tampering with a basic law of cause and effect,

The most fundamental law there is.

I would hardly help you if I'd appreciated the power of your own thinking.

This would be in direct opposition to the purpose of this course.

It is much more helpful to remind you that you do not guard your thoughts carefully enough.

You may feel that at this point it would take a miracle to enable you to do this,

Which is perfectly true.

You are not used to miracle-minded thinking,

But you can be trained to think that way.

All miracle workers need that kind of training.

I cannot let you leave your mind unguarded,

Or you will not be able to help me.

Miracle working entails a full realization of the power of thought in order to avoid miscreation.

Otherwise,

A miracle will be necessary to set the mind itself straight,

A circular process that would not foster the time collapse for which the miracle was intended.

The miracle worker must have genuine respect for true cause and effect as a necessary condition for the miracle to occur.

Both miracles and fear come from thoughts.

If you are not free to choose one,

You would also not be free to choose the other.

By choosing the miracle,

You have rejected fear,

If only temporarily.

You have been fearful of everyone and everything.

You are afraid of God,

Of me,

And of yourself.

You have misperceived or miscreated us and believe in what you have made.

You would not have done this if you were not afraid of your own thoughts.

The fearful must miscreate because they misperceive creation.

When you miscreate,

You are in pain.

The cause and effect principle now becomes a real expediter,

Though only temporarily.

Actually,

Cause is a term properly belonging to God,

And His effect is His Son.

This entails a set of cause and effect relationships totally different from those you introduce into miscreation.

The fundamental conflict in this world,

Then,

Is between creation and miscreation.

All fear is implicit in the second,

And all love in the first.

The conflict is therefore one between love and fear.

It has already been said that you believe you cannot control fear because you yourself made it,

And your belief in it seems to render it out of your control.

Yet any attempt to resolve the error through attempting the mastery of fear is useless.

In fact,

It asserts the power of fear by the very assumption that it need be mastered.

The true resolution rests entirely on mastery through love.

In the interim,

However,

The sense of conflict is inevitable,

Since you have placed yourself in a position where you believe in the power of what does not exist.

Nothing and everything cannot coexist.

To believe in one is to deny the other.

Fear is really nothing,

And love is everything.

Whenever light enters darkness,

The darkness is abolished.

What you believe is true for you.

In this sense,

The separation has occurred,

And to deny it is merely to use denial inappropriately.

However,

To concentrate on error is only a further error.

The initial corrective procedure is to recognize temporarily that there is a problem,

But only as an indication that immediate correction is needed.

This establishes a state of mind in which the atonement can be accepted without delay.

It should be emphasized,

However,

That ultimately no compromise is possible between everything and nothing.

Time is essentially a device by which all compromise in this respect can be given up.

It only seems to be abolished by degrees,

Because time itself involves intervals that do not exist.

Miscreation made this necessary as a corrective device.

The statement,

Quote,

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son,

That whosoever believeth in Him should not perish,

But have everlasting life,

End quote,

Needs only one slight correction to be meaningful in this context.

Quote,

He gave it to His only begotten Son,

End quote.

It should especially be noted that God has only one Son.

If all His creations are His sons,

Everyone must be an integral part of the whole sonship.

The sonship in its oneness transcends the sum of its parts.

However,

This is obscured as long as any of its parts is missing.

That is why the conflict cannot ultimately be resolved until all the parts of the sonship have returned.

Only then can the meaning of wholeness in the true sense be understood.

Any part of the sonship can believe in error or incompleteness if he so chooses.

However,

If he does so,

He is believing in the existence of nothingness.

The correction of this error is the atonement.

I have already briefly spoken about readiness,

But some additional points might be helpful here.

Readiness is only the prerequisite for accomplishment.

The two should not be confused.

As soon as a state of readiness occurs,

There is usually some degree of desire to accomplish,

But it is by no means necessarily undivided.

The state does not imply more than a potential for a change of mind.

Confidence cannot develop fully until mastery has been accomplished.

We have already attempted to correct the fundamental error that fear can be mastered,

And have emphasized that the only real mastery is through love.

Readiness is only the beginning of confidence.

You may think this implies that an enormous amount of time is necessary between readiness and mastery,

But let me remind you that time and space are under my control.

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