A Course in Miracles

ACIM - A Course in MiraclesOnlinerefers to God as the Changeless and Formless (ACIM LessonsW-112.2, W-186.14) Who creates only the changeless (T-6.IV). Consequently, Godis not involved in making changes and alterations in a world of form.

Although much of A Course in MiraclesOnline refers to God in personal terms, as if He were a concerned Father distinct from His children, when we understand the basic metaphysical teachings of ACIMon God, it becomes apparent that the personal, human references to God can not be meant literally. They represent the attempt by Course to use the language that the finite mind can understand, in the condition of separation in which it thinks it is(T-25.I).

 

A Course in Miracles spends very little time on the impossible task of describing to our limited, finite minds the true nature of God, His creations, and Reality—"there is no symbol for totality" (ACIM T-27.III), but there are a few attempts. For example, in theACIM Lessons(W-12), "What He creates is not apart from Him, and nowhere does the Father end, the Son begin as something separate from Him." And acknowledging the impossibility of capturing in words That Which is beyond all concepts and symbols: "Oneness is simply the idea God is. And in His Being, He encompasses all things. No mind holds anything but Him. We say ‘God is,’ and then we cease to speak, for in that knowledge words are meaningless. There are no lips to speak them, and no part of mind sufficiently distinct to feel it is now aware of something not itself. It has united with its Source. And like its Source Itself, it merely is." ACIMLessons (W-169)

So God, Who is All in All(T-7.IV),cannot act on a part of Himself, as if it were separate from Him. A Course in Miracles therefore does not describe God as interacting with his children in the world. That role is given to the Holy Spirit as the Voice for God, providing the Holy Spirit a symbolic function. But since the world is a projection which has no reality, there really is no world in which the Holy Spirit intervenes, only a mind that believes there is a world. And even then the Voice for God has no active function in the mind—It merely reminds us(T-5.II) of the Truth about ourselves and God, which has never changed.

 

What about our changelessness? In our reality as Spirit, nothing has changed and we remain sinless, perfect, and at one with our Source: this is the principle of the Atonement, repeated numerous times throughout the Course. It is in this sense that we are truly changeless. But clearly this is not what we believe or experience about ourselves. And so ACIM does not simply assert what is real and true and leave it at that. That would not be of any help to us, trapped as we seem to be in the morass of our mistaken beliefs. 

 

A Course in Miracles Online accepts us where we think we are, acknowledging that we believe we are each a separate physical being, living as a body in a world of time and space, struggling against forces that seem to be beyond our control. And it offers us the means¬—forgiveness, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit—to find the way out of the mistaken beliefs we have about ourselves.

Not because any of it is real, but only because we believe the world is real. As long as we believe we have changed ourselves from our true Reality as Christ, we will need to move through a seeming process of change that undoes all the changes we believe we have introduced into our identity, until we at last realize that in Reality nothing has changed at all and we are back at home in the Heaven we never left, where we have always been.

 

So this is a process of undoing, and not really doing at all. And any change we may seem to experience in the process of undoing our mistaken beliefs is as illusory as the initial thought of change that seemed to expel us from Heaven. But while we hold on to the belief that change is both possible and real, then change will be our experience. And our only choice will be whether to seek for change that reinforces guilt and separation and seems to take us even farther from our true home, or change that results from the practice of forgiveness in the context of our worldly relationships, allowing us to return.

 

A Course in Miracles Online is available at  http://acim.biz