The Disappearance of the Universe
thenew...@yahoo.com
Universe by Gary Renard. As I mentioned yesterday he is a student of A
Course In Miracles (ACIM). One thing that I like about this book is
that it explains many ACIM doctrines in reasonably straightforward
language, and that saves a lot of time because ACIM itself is not
nearly as straightforward - you often have to wade through a lot of
verbiage to find out exactly what is meant.
Gary's book has gotten a lot of rave reviews on Amazon.com I can't
honestly give him very high marks for originality, but I would give him
outstanding kudos for clearly explaining many ACIM concepts. In regards
to originality his comments on the New Testament, no doubt intended to
be somewhat controversial and startling to some, are really nothing
more than the retelling of various theories held by many contemporary
Biblical scholars and skeptics.
I really didn't see much of anything that was obviously original in
this book other than the author putting these words in the mouths of
the Ascended Masters he seems to claim visited him. They were certainly
chatty characters dispensing a lot of facts, but few, if any new
principles not already contained in ACIM.
If there is anything about The Disappearance of the Universe that
indicates its lack of true inspiration from highly evolved beings it is
the lack of any really new principles. Anybody can make up some
supposed facts that are not easily disproved (due to the distance in
time and history), but it takes real inspiration to come up with a
previously unknown principle.
The author has his Ascended Master Arten say:
J[esus] doesn't speak that much in the Bible, and when he does, he's
often misquoted. ... But J was misquoted most often for the purposes of
the individual novels that became the mainstream Gospels. The
Disappearance of the Universe, p.9, 10
I fully suspect that the Gospels are full of their share of redactions
and errors that crept in with repeated manual copying. But they are not
novels, that is, they are not fictional to the level that Gary would
like to suggest. How do I know that? I know that because when I have
read the Gospels they have spoken to me in ways that tell me that there
is a real core of truth in them. What is truly important - the parables
and stories told by Jesus to illustrate deep ideas and principles - are
still there and still speaking their immortals words as strongly today
as they did 2,000 or so years ago.
Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.
Matthew 24:35
Many of the words recorded as being spoken by the Christ in the New
Testament are immortal words that "shall not pass away," not because
the name of Jesus is immortal, but because the underlying principles
are indeed immortal and shall exist as long as this universe exists.
The real key to understanding this book (and ACIM) seems to be clearly
stated in the following quote:
God could not create anything that is not perfect or else He wouldn't
be perfect. The logic of that is flawless. If God is perfect and
eternal, then by definition anything He creates would also have to be
perfect and eternal. The Disappearance of the Universe, p.39
It is this conception of perfection that explains a great deal of the
rest of the metaphysics of this book, and of ACIM. It looks like they
have "boxed themselves in" with this logical insistence of some sort of
theoretical perfection. A lot of Christians might talk of the
perfection of God, but in truth they don't really mean it other than
some sort of rote expression of faith that is ultimately meaningless.
Unfortunately Gary, and ACIM really mean it.
Because in their conception God is this absolutely "perfect" being he
is the only reality, and everything else - that which is not perfect -
is not real, is only a dream, etc. Well, if that were really true then
what difference does it make anyway? It would seem to me that ACIM
students who claim to have an important message for the world also
claim that nothing is really important anyway, after all it is nothing
more than a dream (and not even our dream because ultimately none of us
exists - we are figments of some cosmic imagination).
I would like to suggest a heresy. God is not perfect. Perfection of the
kind spoken of in ACIM, and Gary's novel is just another illusion
engendered by taking a concept to an unjustified extreme. In New Age
circles you will often hear the expression "As above, so below,"
meaning that there are similarities and resemblances between the higher
worlds, and the lower worlds. The principle that comes from this idea
is that we can learn something about the higher worlds by observing how
things work in the lower worlds. Now they might not be identical, but
they might be similar.
If "As above so below," then I would like to suggest that on his plane
even the God of the universe is struggling to improve his creation and
to comprehend (ever how he does that) the nature and limitations of his
creation. And perhaps the next time he makes a universe he will build
in some improvements that he learned this time around. Worlds without
end, Amen.
-lwk
mr bill
stay tuned...
<thenew...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1157592634....@m73g2000cwd.googlegroups.com...
Carrie
mr bill wrote:
> this aught to be interesting
>
> stay tuned...
>
>
Happy
If this doen't raise the dead nothing will.
LOL ~ HappyD
Sheryl Valentine
--
www.SherylValentine.com
www.sherylvalentine.blogspot.com
<thenew...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1157592634....@m73g2000cwd.googlegroups.com...
Lee Flynn
I've clipped a portion of this writer's comments that poses a *very*
common criticism of one of ACIM's central tenets -- the assertion
that God can only have created the perfect and eternal..
His point is that the Course thus dismisses all of manifest creation
as "not real," and "only a dream, etc." because nothing of this life
measures up to ACIM's description of God (and anything He
created) as only perfect.
He (and many others ;) believes that Course students are thus
faced with several contradictions, in regard to the value of this
material and its message..
1) If this is all a dream, then what difference does anything
that happens here make (including ACIM), at all?
2) Course students who claim that ACIM's message is important
are left to explain what could possibly be important about any
particular element of a mere dream.
3) Assigning value to ACIM across this mere dream is even
more senseless, given that it's "not even our dream because
ultimately none of us exists - we are figments of some cosmic
imagination."
To the writer of this piece (and most ACIM critics I've come
across), these are the *inevitable* issues that result from the
Course's description of this life as a dream. Meaninglessness
reigns across dreams, he reasons. And he traces ACIM's 'need'
to consign this life to a dreamworld back to ACIM's metaphysical
insistence that anything short of its unrealistic definition of
God's perfect/eternal nature MUST be unreal.
Thus he considers ACIM's definition of God and Creation
to be, themselves, unrealistic.
"Perfection of the kind spoken of in ACIM, and Gary's novel
is just another illusion engendered by taking a concept to an
unjustified extreme."
His solution for avoiding the kind of metaphysical trap that
would dismiss this life as meaningless illusion (because it
doesn't pass the "eternal and perfect" test of a perfect God's
"real" creation) is to reject any such definitions of God.
He reasons that God may be less than theoretically perfect,
and in some sense Creating along a learning curve of His own,
such that we need not reject God's authorship of this life, based
on its imperfections.
What I'm wondering is two things. Whether any of you have
responses to the three numbered points that he raises, above.
And whether any of you can more generally respond to his
concern that ACIM's definition of God and His creations as
necessarily both perfect and eternal necessarily dismiss this
human and worldly life as essentially meaningless illusion,
or mere dream, etc.
His objections to what he understands of ACIM's metaphysics
are standard objections among ACIM critics. I think it would
be useful to hear different takes on how that criticism is
answered.
What do you think, folks?
~ Lee
thenew...@yahoo.com wrote:
> I have been reading some in a book called The Disappearance of the
> Universe by Gary Renard. As I mentioned yesterday he is a student of
> A Course In Miracles (ACIM). One thing that I like about this book is
> that it explains many ACIM doctrines in reasonably straightforward
> language, and that saves a lot of time because ACIM itself is not
> nearly as straightforward - you often have to wade through a lot of
> verbiage to find out exactly what is meant.
> .... <snip>
Tom
~ The Course does not say that "it's all a dream." Wapnick, Renard,
and others say that. They, too, should learn how to read, or how to
be honest, or both.
gig
news:hfdeg2tg1d9bdvsnn...@4ax.com...
An excellent point.
Ultimately though, I think this quote from the author's website says it all,
at least for me...
"The world will eventually see greater long term peace and prosperity in the
coming New Age only because some are willing to look at the real world today
and see what needs to be done and do it. Thank you Mr. Bush for being that
kind of man."
gig
Tom
says it all, at least for me...
"The world will eventually see greater long term peace and prosperity
in the coming New Age only because some are willing to look at the
real world today and see what needs to be done and do it. Thank you
Mr. Bush for being that kind of man."
lol. Well, personally, I supported and still support US military
involvement in Afganistan, but not in Iraq. I don't think the
difference in my position can be accounted for because of the way I
read the Course.
Richard @ Tahoe
>responses to the three numbered points that he raises, above.
>And whether any of you can more generally respond to his
>concern that ACIM's definition of God and His creations as
>necessarily both perfect and eternal necessarily dismiss this
>human and worldly life as essentially meaningless illusion,
>or mere dream, etc.
The illusion is only meaningless if that is its purpose for (to) us.
Like all things, it has only the meaning we give to it. It can serve
to reinforce the lessons of the ego or to teach the lessons of
forgiveness.
If you're interested in a little more reading, try this:
http://www.facim.org/acimtemp/backup/lh960702.htm
Richard
Tom
(to) us. Like all things, it has only the meaning we give to it. It
can serve to reinforce the lessons of the ego or to teach the lessons
of forgiveness."
~ The only illusion is not seeing what is there . . . not seeing the
universe of God's creation. To interpret the Course in such a way to
reinforces the idea that what IS there is NOT there is to reinforces
insanity.
"To be told that what you do not see is there sounds like insanity.
It is very difficult to become convinced that it is insanity not to
see what is there, and to see what is not there instead."
Sheryl Valentine
common criticism of one of ACIM's central tenets -- the assertion
that God can only have created the perfect and eternal..
His point is that the Course thus dismisses all of manifest creation
as "not real," and "only a dream, etc." because nothing of this life
measures up to ACIM's description of God (and anything He
created) as only perfect.
sv: I think that the problem lies in how we (as egos) interpret words like,
dream, illusion, world, perfection... as used in ACIM. If you read
carefully, you see that these words always describe *mental states* not
physical ones. the dream of:
separation
crucifixion
hatred
isolation
specialness
punishment
sickness
attack
retribution
and then there's the "happy dream" the dream of peace.
Just as Samuel Greenwood in Footsteps of Israel describes our mental
journey from sepration to remembrance of our true identity in the Bible, so
does ACIM. The bible uses examples in "form" of people, battles, etc. while
ACIM goes straight to content.
Def. of illusion: thoughts objectified, mind projections
I don't think ACIM says 'nothing exists -- it's all a dream, for example,
it says on page 383, "it is *no* dream to love your brother as yourself."
Love is not a dream, it is the means to awaken to a happy dream and thus to
whatever follows that.
Even the word "world", the Course says on page 217 "if you would look upon
Love, which *is* the world's reality...." --- Again, it speaks of *mental
states*. ACIM uses the word "world" in numerous ways -- Go through the
concordance sometime and this becomes readily observable. Sheryl
Tom
words like, dream, illusion, world, perfection... as used in ACIM.
If you read carefully, you see that these words always describe
*mental states* not physical ones."
~ Then there is the branch of thinking that interprets the Course to
say that "physical" is independent of "mental." How this
interpretation is reached has yet to be explained. There is not much,
if anything, in the Course to support it.
Sheryl Valentine
faced with several contradictions, in regard to the value of this
material and its message..
1) If this is all a dream, then what difference does anything
that happens here make (including ACIM), at all?
-- sv: if this is all a dream, what difference does ACIM make?
First, what is "this" -- does it mean *this* computer is a dream, the tree
in my yard is a dream? Or does it speak more profoundly as to my
interpretation of a neutral word as a "dream"? The Course speaks of moving
from dreaming fearful dreams to dreaming a happy dream. A happy dream is
not a life where everything is perfect (from the ego perspective) and that
all our "dreams" are fulfilled, rather it's the process which leads to
recognition that the world we think we live in, one of guilt/fear/attck is
not really that. Through choosing a higher vision to look upon *that*
world, we see a world where fear has been replaced by Love. We see a world
where everything that occurs in our lives can be used to return us to the
vision of a different world. The happy dream, imo, is a full-time job! And
since it's probably safe to say that no one lives there 24/7, we need to get
that down before we can understand what lies beyond it. Sheryl
www.SherylValentine.com
www.sherylvalentine.blogspot.com
"Lee Flynn" <lucid...@att.net> wrote in message
news:BbGNg.119944$5i3....@bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net...
Sheryl Valentine
are left to explain what could possibly be important about any
particular element of a mere dream.
sv: well first it's not just critics of ACIM that do this, but also some
course students. I've read accusations by course students that "other"
course students are just trying to have a happier dream versus awakening
from the dream. Huh? we can't awaken from the dream until we first get to
experiencing a "happy dream" more than once every 3 weeks ;)! Speaking for
myself, study/practice of the Course has led me to an increased enjoyment of
life, to a sense of purpose and meaning not only to my life, but the life of
every single person. It has led me to the recognition that the choice for
peace/forgiveness/love is "real" and leads to "real" effects.
While i still have problems, flaws, weaknesses, frustrations/etc. -- I've
come to know that thhose places of pain are only where I've left God out of
the loop.
I read an article a few months back in miracles magazine where the author
said that the purpose of ACIM is to get us to escape the physical world.
Imo, this is totally not true, rather, and again more profoundly,it's
teaching us to view a neutral world differently. No where in ACIM does ask
us to gain a different perception of the tree in our backyard -- it asks us
to ask for a higher perception of our brother, ourselves and God, period.
Sheryl
--
www.SherylValentine.com
www.sherylvalentine.blogspot.com
"Lee Flynn" <lucid...@att.net> wrote in message
news:BbGNg.119944$5i3....@bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net...
Sheryl Valentine
words like, dream, illusion, world, perfection... as used in ACIM.
If you read carefully, you see that these words always describe
*mental states* not physical ones."
Tom~ Then there is the branch of thinking that interprets the Course to
say that "physical" is independent of "mental." How this
interpretation is reached has yet to be explained. There is not much,
if anything, in the Course to support it.
sv: are you agreeing or disagreeing with me? I'm sure you're well aware
that I only have limited *mental* capacity in these intellectual discussions
;) . Sheryl
--
www.SherylValentine.com
www.sherylvalentine.blogspot.com
"Tom" <tom...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:mgreg2p67jrukbj8m...@4ax.com...
Sheryl Valentine
(to) us. Like all things, it has only the meaning we give to it. It
can serve to reinforce the lessons of the ego or to teach the lessons
of forgiveness."
Tomm:~ The only illusion is not seeing what is there . . . not seeing the
universe of God's creation. To interpret the Course in such a way to
reinforces the idea that what IS there is NOT there is to reinforces
insanity.
"To be told that what you do not see is there sounds like insanity.
It is very difficult to become convinced that it is insanity not to
see what is there, and to see what is not there instead."
sv; I was going to say "good point" to Richard, but now I'm confused ;)
sheryl
--
www.SherylValentine.com
www.sherylvalentine.blogspot.com
"Tom" <tom...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:5sqeg2taqc0sqd0gp...@4ax.com...
Tom
words like, dream, illusion, world, perfection... as used in ACIM.
If you read carefully, you see that these words always describe
*mental states* not physical ones."
Tom~ Then there is the branch of thinking that interprets the Course
to say that "physical" is independent of "mental." How this
interpretation is reached has yet to be explained. There is not much,
if anything, in the Course to support it.
Sheryl "are you agreeing or disagreeing with me? I'm sure you're
well aware that I only have limited *mental* capacity in these
intellectual discussions"
~ Neither. You are engaged in magical thinking, according to the
Course. I do that too.
Tom
universe of God's creation. To interpret the Course in such a way to
reinforces the idea that what IS there is NOT there is to reinforces
insanity."
"To be told that what you do not see is there sounds like insanity.
It is very difficult to become convinced that it is insanity not to
see what is there, and to see what is not there instead."
Aheryl "I was going to say "good point" to Richard, but now I'm
confused "
~ Ken is in a tough position. He has to maintain the illusion that he
knows what he's talking about, when he doesn't. Maybe that's the risk
of going to print too soon. He's not the type that can easily say,
"You know that book I wrote 20 years ago? Well, I got it wrong."
Sheryl Valentine
Course. I do that too.
sv: okay, well cool ;) sheryl
--
www.SherylValentine.com
www.sherylvalentine.blogspot.com
"Tom" <tom...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:6oseg25ke8hdrugl2...@4ax.com...
mr bill
exists, then only that which cannot be threatened can be real.
what matters is what one means by "threatened."
one may assume that because it can be destroyed, that which is physical can
be threatened. the problem with that is that word "destroyed." we assume
that because we see what we call destruction, that it is really so. well, a
forest fire "destroys" a forest, but in its wake it cleans out the dry and
dead brush that collects in forests, makes pine cones drop their seeds, and
leaves a rich layers of topsoil for the forest to re-grow from. in this
example, what can be seen as destruction can also be seen as creation.
it all depends on the meaning one gives it. the universe is quite real, but
it is the meanings one gives it that is the illusion. life IS, period, from
there we assign all sorts of meanings, and create the illusion.
"Lee Flynn" <lucid...@att.net> wrote in message
news:BbGNg.119944$5i3....@bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net...
Nancy
Lee Flynn wrote:
> Hey folks,
>
> I've clipped a portion of this writer's comments that poses a *very*
> common criticism of one of ACIM's central tenets -- the assertion
> that God can only have created the perfect and eternal..
>
> His point is that the Course thus dismisses all of manifest creation
> as "not real," and "only a dream, etc." because nothing of this life
> measures up to ACIM's description of God (and anything He
> created) as only perfect.
>
> He (and many others ;) believes that Course students are thus
> faced with several contradictions, in regard to the value of this
> material and its message..
> 1) If this is all a dream, then what difference does anything
> that happens here make (including ACIM), at all?
I'm not very good at explaining what I think
about this particular topic, and I'll probably
use more words than wiser people would find
necessary. Still, I'd like to take a stab at it.
I think that some of the terms used in the
course are sort of a "best approximation" of
what the author actually means, and I
think that "dream" and "illusion" are two
such terms. When a typical student
reads these terms, it's natural for him (or
her) to associate them with their physical
world equivalents. And from that associa-
tion, it's also natural to assign dreams and
illusions a relative value, based on an
assumption that something "better" (and
something "worse") exists.
But the course is based on an absence
of relative value.
If the world of phenomena is illusory --
something created by Mind or mind --
and if it is viewed in the present without
judgment -- it acquires a sort of "perfection"
in that it loses its relative position.
> 2) Course students who claim that ACIM's message is important
> are left to explain what could possibly be important about any
> particular element of a mere dream.
I think, again, that the word "important"
implies a relative position among things that
are "more important" and things that are
"less important." Without that position, it
simply "is".
What "is" is true.
> 3) Assigning value to ACIM across this mere dream is even
> more senseless, given that it's "not even our dream because
> ultimately none of us exists - we are figments of some cosmic
> imagination."
And... all of this can be said to be
"true" when certain interpretations
of course teachings, particularly
those that emphasize the "is no
world" aspect, are measured against
a yardstick of physical world values.
It doesn't really matter which of the
many yardsticks available you use.
The effect is about the same.
I don't think it's possible to actually
"answer" criticism of this sort because
its fundamental (and invisible) premise
is the existence of relative value, whereas
the teachings of the course are based
on an absence of relative value.
> What do you think, folks?
Fmp, it's a heck of a way to occupy
one's brain on a rainy fall day. :)
Thanks, Lee.
Nancy
Sheryl Valentine
one's brain on a rainy fall day. :)
Thanks, Lee.
sv: I felt the same way -- it was fun to tackle it some. :() sheryl
--
www.SherylValentine.com
www.sherylvalentine.blogspot.com
"Nancy" <nancyl...@shaw.ca> wrote in message
news:1158182038....@h48g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
Pieter
> 1) If this is all a dream, then what difference does anything
> that happens here make (including ACIM), at all?
The dream just is that
separation would be real.
That anything I perceive outside
of me has nothing to do with me,
unless I establish a rapport with it;
that then is a "special relationship".
> 2) Course students who claim that ACIM's message is important
> are left to explain what could possibly be important about any
> particular element of a mere dream.
The Course is meant to awaken
the dreamers of the dream of separation.
"Join not your brother's dreams but join with him,
and where you join His Son the Father is." T-28.IV.10:1.
Any brother is a Son of God in truth.
> 3) Assigning value to ACIM across this mere dream is even
> more senseless, given that it's "not even our dream because
> ultimately none of us exists - we are figments of some cosmic
> imagination."
"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." T-2.VII.6:3-5
If the parts of the Sonship were mery illusions,
why would it be so important that they (we) *all* return?
We only *think* we are separate parts, yet we all
individually are part of God and one with Him and one another.
To give up the dream is to give up *the thought of separation*,
and not any created being we feel separated from.
Tom
"answer" criticism of this sort because
its fundamental (and invisible) premise
is the existence of relative value, whereas
the teachings of the course are based
on an absence of relative value."
~ Would you classify this as a philosophy of detachment? Wars, death,
and destruction continue as usual, but your aim is to remove yourself
from having any opinions about it. If it is neither good nor bad for
other people to drop the bombs, what difference might it make if you
were to drop a few yourself?
Tom
separation would be real.
That anything I perceive outside
of me has nothing to do with me,
unless I establish a rapport with it;
that then is a "special relationship".
~ How do you know what is "outside" of you and what is not?
Doug Thompson
There are two "worlds" ACIM talks about. Neither is synonymous with "earth"
except maybe in a very few passages.
"The world as ego sees it" is the illusion. That's a world full of sin and
guilt and anything unpleasant you care to name or imagine or manifest. The
"Real World" is the reality ... but that is said to be an "illusion" too. I
don't think EITHER of those "worlds" are different "physical objects" or
places, but rather they are ways of perceiving everything, physical and
psychological and experiential. They are "worlds of the mind" and not
anything physical per se at all.
"Forgiveness" becomes relatively simple to understand if you believe that
the "guilt" you perceive in anyone is all in your mind ... and it is pretty
easy to demonstrate that "guilt" (and thus sin) is wholly a human artefact.
We decide what is "sin" and what isn't and we decide how to judge it and
having judged anything negatively we then get to feel unhappy about it.
I think this is a core message of ACIM, the New Testament as I read it, and
several notable teachers of forgiveness who have nothing to do with ACIM.
It's recognizing that I am not a victim of "external forces", that I
"attracted" whatever I'm experiencing for my own learning, and that no one
is to "blame", no one is "guilty", no one needs to be "punished" and no one
needs to be "coerced." Whatever one's opinion of the merits of that view,
one undebatable feature of it is that with it, forgiveness is easy and there
is no reason at all to hold onto grievances. It's impossible to see any
"blame" if you believe you are responsible for your own experience!
Now ACIM does say, in the "Urtext" version, that God created space, time and
matter as "teaching devices for your mind." There is no question that these
things aren't permanent, they are temporary classrooms if you will,
instruments of learning which are no longer needed when the lessons are
learned. The body, we know, ain't going to be around for very long in its
current form! If we believe in re-incarnation as the Course certainly
appears to, we know we get a new one as soon as we "need" it for our
learning. So the "loss of life" isn't such a big deal, it's just the loss
of a body, it's inevitable eventually anyway, it doesn't mean the death of
myself or the end of life, it is just a transition, compared in ACIM to
casting off "an outworn garment." To the ego, in whose thought system the
Body IS itself (and actually without body there is no ego, the ego is the
idea that I am a body) the body has to be valuable.
The attachment to the body is a major problem, "ego" is a thought system
whose core message is "I am a body" and what my body loses, "I" lose. From
that thought system the belief in guilt and sin are obvious ... and almost
completely unavoidable ... anything that I can perceive you doing to my body
that I don't like is your sin and your guilt. Indeed just being in a body
with physical senses and physical needs is enough to generate that "ego
thought system" to some extent and is what the Course is saying DOES
generate it.
We chose to be in bodies I presume because we had, to some extent, some
belief already in that way of thinking or we needed the "teaching device" to
learn how to train our minds to overcome the "illusion" the body generates
that "I am a body" and that the body has much significance. This goes back
to the "separation illusion", that I can think or live apart from God and
You, and the body, which appears to be separate, is an ideal manifestation
of that idea ... along with being an ideal device for CORRECTING it!
Every religion I know of teaches that physical life on Earth is not our
"true home", that it is transitory, that there is some kind of "teaching" or
"learning" function going on, and that when we leave this world we go to a
better place. In that sense, in ALL religions, "the physical is not real"
or at least not "ultimate reality" and nobody can argue that bodies are more
than temporary vehicles for the mind! We know they don't last very long!!!
Only a handful of religions place much emphasis on the "physical" as much
more than symbolic, transitory and second rate.
Gary and Ken make the point that their metaphysics is totally different from
all other religions, and claim to have derived their metaphysics from the
Course. With Ken, his metaphysics was there when he picked up the Course
and he's spent a lifetime trying to dismiss the bulk of the Course as "myth"
or "metaphor" because it flatly says his metaphysics is false! The
difference between "Kenthink" and religion in general though isn't really in
the "reality/unreality" element, as I've just shown. The difference is in
the meaning that reality/unreality is given.
ACIM describes a process of mind training and progressive awakening whereby
we learn to "see the face of Christ in every living thing" and "forgive"
ourselves for projecting guilt and sin on "Christ",learning to take
responsibility for our own experience, and gradually become aware of the
"Real World" which is characterized as, quite literally, "Heaven on earth."
This is a transformation, not just of the individual mind, soul,
consciousness, but of the whole human race and human society being
described, and being described as "inevitable" and as possibly "taking
millions of years." This is the "crusade to save the world" and the value
of individual enlightenment as one "Awakens" one unconsciously helps others
do so.
This idea, that "The City of God" as Augustine called it or "Heaven on
Earth" as others have called it is an achievable project in space and time
and is God's Will and is the teleological outcome of the space-time
experience AND is, as ACIM describes it, "The Gate of Heaven" through which
we must pass before we get to heaven, is by no means new OR different than
core ideas found in many religions. It's the teaching of ACIM and its 180
degrees off the Wapnick/Renard approach to "the world" which they see as a
hopeless write-off. Renard dismisses both social AND biological evolution.
He has Thomas and Thaddeus, two of Jesus' Apostles, say that earth history
has had many technically advanced civilizations before which came and went
but that some conspiracy among academics hides this information. Well
Jimminy Cricket, we can find traces of human (modern man) activity of a
profoundly non-technical nature going back more than 50,000 years (possibly
as much as 250,000) but not trace of agriculture or significantly large
populations before ~20,000 years ago and then not much agriculture until
about 10,000 years ago. We know what our ancestor hominids of 1,000,000
years ago looked like, a lot like chimps. We sometimes find their bones in
sedimentary rock of that period. If there were skyscrapers and autobahns
and airplanes and battleships around with the dinosaurs, how come we find
the dinosaurs and chimps and even primitive hunter-gatherer humans who
walked very "light" on the earth indeed, leaving little more than
cave-paintings and bones, and none of the much larger and more durable
technological artefacts? If Gary WANTED anyone with half a brain to believe
his story he should have just left that paragraph out because it is NOT
credible. But he needs to manufacture evidence (since no real evidence
exists) to disprove what the real evidence does show, that life is evolving
to ever higher levels of organization and consciousness and therefore
responsibility just as ACIM says IT MUST! But GaryKen insist it can't and
won't and hasn't.
The point is made to stress the idea that on earth there is nothing but
endless repetition of the dance of guilt and death and the only way out is
INDIVIDIAL "awakening" to the state of "Ascended Master." The Course says
we all go together, "the Ark of Peace is entered two by two." Gary and Ken
say we go alone and there is no hope, no evolution and no redemption on
earth. There is only an opportunity to learn what they call "forgiveness"
but which, when you look at what they mean by it, you find has nothing to do
with what anyone else, including Jesus, would recognize as genuine
forgiveness! It certainly has nothing to do with forgiving people!
Ken is correct, I think, to criticize a dominant (but by no means universal)
idea in Christianity that there is redemptive value in suffering. He's
correct to recognize that this is just evidence of a deep belief in the
reality of guilt ... that being guilty, I deserve to suffer. It's NOT God's
Will! It's MY WILL! But it is unconscious and repressed. He's also right
to point out that the Course criticizes theologies which tend to make sin
"real" and fail to recognize that it is, for sure, an illusion.
But describing my misperceptions as illusions I made up consciously or
unconsciously (and Perceptual Psychology was making that point when Helen
and Bill were Psych Professors) doesn't make the mountains and the trees and
the oceans and the entire physical universe into "an attack on God"
generated by the "ego" no less, and 15 billion years before there COULD have
been an ego in the sense the Course uses the term at that! The Course says
clearly that the ego comes AFTER the body and doesn't survive the body's
death, although the individual soul, which Ken wrote out of ACIM, does!
Presumably aspects of the split mind and separation illusion also survive
but while the ego uses these ideas as a foundation, given a body to work
with, the idea that "I am a body" can hardly develop in the absence of a
body now can it?
Remember what ACIM says about the ego?
"2. Each man makes one ego for himself, although it is subject to enormous
variation because of its instability, and one for everyone he perceives,
which
is equally variable. Their interaction is a process which literally alters
both, because they were not made either BY or WITH the unalterable. It is
particularly important to realize that this alteration can and does occur as
readily when the interaction takes place IN THE MIND as when it involves
physical presence. THINKING about another ego is as effective in changing
relative perception as is physical interaction. There could be no better
example of the fact that the ego is an idea, though not a reality-based
thought." HLC T IV C 2 (76)
So having made an ego for myself my ego then proceeded with the big bang?
What was your ego doing at that time?
The Course does not say God did not create the universe, it does not say God
did not create Earth. It spends a great deal of time correcting the Bible,
and most of it in the early chapters of Genesis where the most famous and
significant statement is there on page one ... "in the beginning God created
the heaven and the earth!"
While correcting bits and pieces of the Eden myth, Jesus could have, if he
wanted to, have corrected the Big Story in the first chapter of Genesis. He
didn't. To me the LACK of any single clear and unequivocal statement, let
alone many of them, in this regard is itself enormously persuasive evidence
to me that the Author of ACIM had no intention of saying God didn't create
the universe. Everything else he wanted to say he says many times and in
many ways.
Nowhere does ACIM contradict or correct Genesis 1:1!! It does say God
created space and time and matter as teaching devices for our minds which is
pretty much what most religions say. Ken, of course, took that part out to
make ACIM less obviously completely incompatible with his own neo-Gnostic
dualism. And when ACIM says "the world you see" (meaning the world you
conjure in your minds with your distorted physical vision which is not the
real world) Ken reads "earth" and in doing that he misreads ACIM. When ACIM
says "you made the world as an attack on God" meaning that illusion of a
world you made up, and not the real world at all, Ken reads "earth." Again,
misreading ACIM. The misreading of ACIM is made easier by the fact that he
took out the definition of "world" which Jesus had given Helen at the
beginning, which definition would make that error less likely since it
clearly indicates that "world" isn't being used to refer to the planet or
anything physical.
Then there is the "dualism" bit ... go get a dictionary and you will A) find
that the word "non-dualism" isn't in any of them and that b) "dualism"
refers to that body of belief which sees the physical and spiritual as
radically separate rather than all as part of a single, unitary whole.
Ken's teaching is precisely a text-book example of theological "dualism"
(which he mistakenly calls non-dualism, a mistake the good Apostles in
Gary's fantasy also picked up) while Christianity and the Course are precise
examples of "monism" (everything is one) and "monism" is the opposite of
"dualism". Ken and Gary, and apparently Thomas and Thaddeus too, need a
dictionary. The "illusion" is in seeing things as separate when they ARE in
fact ONE! Ken has got it upside-down saying that things ARE in fact two and
that perception of that isn't illusory, the stuff being perceived is
illusory. The "illusion" which ACIM presents as being in our minds, and
being a misperception of reality which can be corrected by the Holy Spirit
is shifted in the Wapnick/Renard theology from my mind to the physical stuff
of the universe. THAT is where the illusion is, out there on the street,
not in my mind! That's why the Universe has to disappear in Gary's
thinking, while in ACIM it's just the misperceptions (or worlds of illusion)
which disappear WHEN WE LEARN TO PERCEIVE THE REAL WORLD CORRECTLY! (and not
before!) The Universe, which ACIM very clearly states was created by God
too, survives our awakening, apparently but we don't need bodies after the
awakening is complete.
But Thomas and Thaddeus (AKA Arten and Pursah) have a few other problems ...
somehow they got the idea that the 1975 Abridgement of the Course is
'unedited' and 'unabridged' ... and they're dead wrong on that one which
ANYONE from the "future" will certainly know quite a bit about. So I don't
have much trouble when I find they are dead wrong about a great deal else.
Gary's Apostles [mis]inform him (and us) that there are 20,000 Christian
denominations on earth! They should know eh?, being founders of
Christianity and all. They forgot, somehow, to notice an additional 18,380
denominations that the World Christian Encyclopedia lists. It's list has
38,380 in total. Now just how clever are these ascended masters who don't
know what anyone can find on the internet in 30 seconds? Perhaps they
REALLY can't read ... If you want to claim your source is an Ascended
Master, an Apostle of Jesus, and that his information is correct by virtue
of that exalted status, you gotta make sure you don't have him making
mistakes that are THAT DUMB and obvious! Especially when ANOTHER Ascended
Master and Apostle is sitting beside him and is also too dumb to Know or to
even CHECK!
I find Gary's book to be a highly entertaining and engaging way of
undertaking theological speculation ... to put his and Ken's ideas into the
mouths of fictional characters who teach a fictional student those ideas.
It is reminiscent of C.S. Lewis's theological fiction which is in a similar
genre with similar structure. It's a very good way to present theology to a
lay audience Theology is usually incredibly dry for most readers. I don't
even protest that Gary's interpretation of the Course is sophomoric and
mistaken. I just protest that he lies about the story, claiming it is
non-fiction when it is very obviously fiction. This gives his own personal
theological speculation the stamp of Apostolic Authority to anyone gullible
enough to be sucked in by the ruse and a lot of people have been sucked in
and Gary gets very upset when people don't believe he really chats with
Jesus' Apostles in the flesh!
It's one thing to stand up and say "I believe this" and present your ideas
for discussion and quite another to stand up and say "The Apostles told me
this and it is absolutely true and beyond question or discussion, you have
to believe this due to the Authority of its source" when you know that's not
actually true.
The former is what a student and scholar should be doing to share truth and
uncover mistakes. The latter is what only wolves in sheep's clothing do to
part fools from their money.
Gary didn't need to lie about his book to sell it. He could just be coy ...
which he was at first actually ... and say it doesn't matter what you
believe about his alleged visitors. While that is not precisely true in
that if one does believe they are Apostles then one is likely to believe
everything they say is right more than if one recognized it's just Gary and
Ken talking, it's still a lot more honest that claiming that fiction is
non-fiction! Well, less DIShonest at any rate.
It's funny too in that Gary notes (correctly) that some writings of St. Paul
are believed by Biblical Scholars NOT to have been really written by Paul.
Gary presents this as a major shot against Christianity, that there are
"falsehoods" and even deliberate ones in the New Testament. Of course in
those days "pseudepigraphy" or signing a master's name to one's own work was
common and was considered a sign of humility and respect for the master,
rather than an act of deception and fraud the way it is now viewed.
Apparently it was "wrong" then to lie about authorship and who said what
back then ... but today, well things are different. The world doesn't
really exist anyway so hey, what does it matter WHAT I do, I will be
forgiven and if I make a lot of money on the way, I'll have more fun!
That's called antinomianism and it cropped up in the First Century Church,
Paul addressed the problem in his Epistles. If all is forgiven as many
religions teach THEN what DOES it matter what you do? Why not lie and cheat
and steal? There is no "real guilt" so why not? This problem is part of
the reason why many religions end up making sin and guilt "real" because
without that tool the function of the religious institution as regulator of
social behaviour tends to break down and that role, well, is where most
religions got their bread and butter!
Jesus has a better answer than "sin is real." It is "what you give is what
you get." That's a reason to be nice to others rather than lie to them
because whatever you give to the "world" that appears to be external is
being given to yourself and WILL manifest in your experience sooner or
later. THAT is one of the things TIME was created to TEACH us! :) Rather
clearly THAT lesson is one that Ken and Gary are still waiting to learn! :)
Oh yeah and Gary, Arten and Pursah claim ACIM isn't a "religion." Well ...
no it's a book. But then I guess they REALLY don't have a dictionary
because a religion is, in sociology: "a belief system shared by a group of
individuals." Just how Ken or anyone could imagine this book could be read
by millions without generating a "group of individuals" who would share a
belief system with regards to it beats me!
All the best,
Doug
Tom
with "earth" except maybe in a very few passages.
"The world as ego sees it" is the illusion. That's a world full of
sin and guilt and anything unpleasant you care to name or imagine or
manifest. The "Real World" is the reality ... but that is said to be
an "illusion" too. I don't think EITHER of those "worlds" are
different "physical objects" or places, but rather they are ways of
perceiving everything, physical and psychological and experiential.
They are "worlds of the mind" and not anything physical per se at all
~ Kindly account for the following:
"The real world is not like this. It has no buildings, and there are
no streets where people walk alone and separate. There are no stores
where people buy an endless list of things they do not need. It is not
lit with artificial light, and night comes not upon it. There is no
day that brightens and grows dim. There is no loss. Nothing is there
but shines, and shines forever. The world YOU see must be DENIED, for
sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision."
Doug Thompson
"Sheryl Valentine" <SherylV...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:4mp95iF...@individual.net...
> Lee: He (and many others ;) believes that Course students are thus
> faced with several contradictions, in regard to the value of this
> material and its message..
>
> 1) If this is all a dream, then what difference does anything
> that happens here make (including ACIM), at all?
>
>
> -- sv: if this is all a dream, what difference does ACIM make?
> First, what is "this" -- does it mean *this* computer is a dream, the
tree
> in my yard is a dream? Or does it speak more profoundly as to my
> interpretation of a neutral word as a "dream"? The Course speaks of
moving
> from dreaming fearful dreams to dreaming a happy dream. A happy dream is
> not a life where everything is perfect (from the ego perspective) and that
> all our "dreams" are fulfilled, rather it's the process which leads to
> recognition that the world we think we live in, one of guilt/fear/attck is
> not really that. Through choosing a higher vision to look upon *that*
> world, we see a world where fear has been replaced by Love. We see a world
> where everything that occurs in our lives can be used to return us to the
> vision of a different world. The happy dream, imo, is a full-time job!
And
> since it's probably safe to say that no one lives there 24/7, we need to
get
> that down before we can understand what lies beyond it. Sheryl
Amen! Well said!
The Course is directing us to exchange the "nightmare" for the "happy dream"
... or the "world of illusion" for "the real world" ... same concept,
different words.
Now this "happy dream" notion and the "real world" notion, the idea that
with a changed mind our experience of life on earth is transformed from one
of unhappiness to one of happiness is an idea that some perspectives on
ACIM, notably that of Gary Renard's fictional Apostles, entirely ignore.
Instead they focus on the dour vision of a hopelessly screwed up world in
which nothing can every REALLY be happy, and that somehow we can escape this
world ... but I notice that they never tell us HOW and they haven't done it
themselves! :)
All the best,
Doug
Doug Thompson
> No where in ACIM does ask
> us to gain a different perception of the tree in our backyard -- it asks
us
> to ask for a higher perception of our brother, ourselves and God, period.
> Sheryl
Actually it tells us to "see the face of Christ in every living thing." If
that tree in your backyard is alive it IS your brother !!
For most people that IS a "different" perception and its 180 degrees
different from the "the tree is an attack on God" school of thought.
Tom
"happy dream" ... or the "world of illusion" for "the real world" ...
same concept, different words."
~ There's no good reason I know of to think that the "happy dream" is
the same thing as the "real world."
Doug Thompson
I think I said "the worlds" ACIM discusses aren't "anything physical per se
at all." With a VERY few possible exceptions when the "world" may refer to
something physical, as in "God so loved the world He gave it TO his Son." I
think the quote you cited takes a few more words to say EXACTLY the same
thing. It's not talking about physical stuff, either man-made (artificial
light) or natural (no day and night) but "mental stuff" if you will.
The fundamental illusion we're admonished to recognize is that of guilt and
sin. Clearly neither are "physical things" but "mental things" or pure idea
and interpretation. I think it is a huge diversion from the important
message to worry about whether that tree over there is "real" or "an
illusion." The only point at which it matters is that if you start thinking
the tree is the illusion then you start to think of it as evil and then you
start to see it as your problem. The tree is not your problem, your mind is
your problem! And as for the tree, what ACIM tells us to do with it is "see
the face of Christ" in it!
The basic Christian idea (not contradicted in ACIM) that The "world"
(material universe) is "good" because God created it is reflected in ACIM
many times, "see the face of Christ in every living thing" and even "God is
in the Wastebasket." Space, time and matter were created as "teaching
devices for your mind" ... and they have a Holy purpose however "illusory"
they might be.
And we know, of course, that our physical senses perceive "stuff" in very
odd ways! They are "normal" to us, but in fact that steel door is 99% (or
more) empty space! So is your hand! Other than the empty space there are
just little swirls of energy which, so far as anyone knows, ARE eternal!
Einstein pointed out that time seems linear only because of our sensory
apparatus. The door appears solid only because of our sensory apparatus.
Time is not linear and the door is mostly empty space. We know that from
Physics. Why is it so hard to understand what Jesus means by "perception is
misleading"?
So IN THAT SENSE you (and me) constructed the experience of a "solid door"
in our minds using perceptual data delivered by the body, and our notion of
the door as solid is an illusion, albeit a NECESSARY one so long as we're in
bodies! We made up the idea of the door being solid. We didn't make up the
door! Or the billions of galaxies in the universe ...
But still I think this is not a very useful question ... it's not like our
opinion of the creation of matter has any earthly application!
Regardless of what Jesus might be meaning about the creation of matter, it
is abundantly clear that most of the most important illusions he's talking
to us about aren't illusions about "stuff" except insofar as we think we are
bodies, but they are misperceptions OF stuff in which we ascribe attributes
of guilt and sin to stuff, to people, to behaviours, attitudes which CAUSE a
great deal of completely needless conflict and suffering.
And regardless of "who created it" I think all schools agree that the Holy
Spirit can use ANYTHING for HIS purposes if we're willing, and that ANYTHING
thus used (whomever created it) then becomes holy with a holy purpose,
including the body and the planet and anything else you care to name.
The 'real world' which is a place of peace and harmony and joy and beauty
which contains the answer to every problem and is the gate of heaven is a
way of PERCEIVING which has very little, if anything, to do with "stuff" as
the quote you cited clearly states. ACIM talks about looking on the beauty
of a "forgiven world" ... and the power to forgive and so look on the world
as forgiven is yours and mine. It's not any change in physical attributes
or any physical attributes themselves in which the "reality" and joy of the
"real world" reside ... it's purely mental, purely attitudinal.
Contrast that with the Wapnickian idea that the world is totally bad, having
only the purpose of attacking God. That's hardly a forgiving attitude,
indeed it is a deep grievance against whomever is responsible for our being
here. It's either hatred of and anger toward God if one supposes God is
responsible or hatred and anger toward self if one supposes one's self is
responsible. It leaves one with the options of rage or depression or
denial. It's the OPPOSITE of forgiveness which sees IN THE WORLD only the
joy, only the Holy Purpose ... and sees all the ugliness and pain and sin
and guilt and misery as ILLUSIONS which we dreamed up. It's that very
negative, grievance-riddled view of the world which ACIM says is the
illusion ... not the molecules which are characterized as "teaching devices"
which are "neutral" having ONLY the value we ascribe to them! That's
opposite of what Wapnick teaches, which is that matter is far from neutral
but in essence, "evil".
One key in understanding the difference in perspective here lies in the
phrase "the world you see." Sometimes this is just written as "this world"
and sometimes it's written as "the world as IT [ego] sees it." I take these
to be essentially synonymous. Now we should know that anything "as Ego
perceives it" is going to be perceived falsely, the ego's perceptions of
anything are always going to be misperceptions, at least in part. So any
reference to "as you see it" or "as ego sees it" CAN'T refer to "it" as it
"really" is. And that includes "the world" even where "the world" means
planet earth or even the entire physical universe. Regardless of what the
physical stuff might actually be, EGO WON'T SEE IT AS IT REALLY IS EVER
because it cannot perceive correctly!
But what Ken is doing is taking those statements of how the Ego misperceives
the world as being full of sin and guilt ... and Ken's not the only one ...
and concluding that the Ego is right! The world IS full of sin and guilt
and the only hope for us is to get out of it! Jesus doesn't call on us to
escape the world, he calls on us to SAVE it.
All the best,
Doug
Sheryl Valentine
> words like, dream, illusion, world, perfection... as used in ACIM.
> If you read carefully, you see that these words always describe
> *mental states* not physical ones."
>
>
> say that "physical" is independent of "mental." How this
> interpretation is reached has yet to be explained. There is not much,
> if anything, in the Course to support it.
>
Doug:There are two "worlds" ACIM talks about. Neither is synonymous with
"earth"
except maybe in a very few passages.
sv: yes. I think that what is occuring in 'my' world is *not* independent of
my mental state, but by "physical" I did mean earth. Sheryl
--
www.SherylValentine.com
www.sherylvalentine.blogspot.com
"Doug Thompson" <dtho...@hotmail.cam> wrote in message
news:r9udne2T-rO_EZXY...@golden.net...
Sheryl Valentine
>
> "The real world is not like this. It has no buildings, and there are
> no streets where people walk alone and separate. There are no stores
> where people buy an endless list of things they do not need. It is not
> lit with artificial light, and night comes not upon it. There is no
> day that brightens and grows dim. There is no loss. Nothing is there
> but shines, and shines forever. The world YOU see must be DENIED, for
> sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision."
sv; Imo, the Course isn't talking about the this world (earth) of form but
is talking about the world of our thoughts, which where there is of course
no buildings. ;) sheryl
--
www.SherylValentine.com
www.sherylvalentine.blogspot.com
"Doug Thompson" <dtho...@hotmail.cam> wrote in message
news:Q-6dndLM1s6RPJXY...@golden.net...
Sheryl Valentine
one undebatable feature of it is that with it, forgiveness is easy and there
is no reason at all to hold onto grievances. It's impossible to see any
"blame" if you believe you are responsible for your own experience!
sv: wow. I just printed out your posts and read them, as usual, very
enjoyable reading and all I can say is: yeah, yeah, I agree! lol! but as to
the above, forgivness is really not *that* easy! ;) sheryl
--
www.SherylValentine.com
www.sherylvalentine.blogspot.com
"Doug Thompson" <dtho...@hotmail.cam> wrote in message
news:r9udne2T-rO_EZXY...@golden.net...
Sheryl Valentine
sin. Clearly neither are "physical things" but "mental things" or pure idea
and interpretation. I think it is a huge diversion from the important
message to worry about whether that tree over there is "real" or "an
illusion."
-- sv: I agree, it seems like a mute point to me when, imo, seeing the
course as speaking of the 'world of thought' makes it much more profound and
valuable as how we live our lives. Sheryl
www.SherylValentine.com
www.sherylvalentine.blogspot.com
"Doug Thompson" <dtho...@hotmail.cam> wrote in message
news:Q-6dndLM1s6RPJXY...@golden.net...
Sheryl Valentine
phrase "the world you see." Sometimes this is just written as "this world"
and sometimes it's written as "the world as IT [ego] sees it.
-- sv: yes. I once did a study on the word "world" in the Course and this
becomes readily observable. Even recently, I went through the condordance
reading the word "world" and again, it makes a big difference in how it's
understood. Sheryl
www.SherylValentine.com
www.sherylvalentine.blogspot.com
"Doug Thompson" <dtho...@hotmail.cam> wrote in message
news:Q-6dndLM1s6RPJXY...@golden.net...
>
Tom
> ~ Kindly account for the following:
>
> "The real world is not like this. It has no buildings, and there are
> no streets where people walk alone and separate. There are no stores
> where people buy an endless list of things they do not need. It is
not lit with artificial light, and night comes not upon it. There is
no day that brightens and grows dim. There is no loss. Nothing is
there but shines, and shines forever. The world YOU see must be
DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision."
>
Doug "I think I said "the worlds" ACIM discusses aren't "anything
physical per se at all." With a VERY few possible exceptions when the
"world" may refer to something physical, as in "God so loved the world
He gave it TO his Son."
~ You are saying that God loved the physical world? That makes no
sense at all.
Doug "I think the quote you cited takes a few more words to say
EXACTLY the same thing. It's not talking about physical stuff, either
man-made (artificial light) or natural (no day and night) but "mental
stuff" if you will."
~ How can you say that the above quote is not talking about streets,
buildings, day, and night, when that is EXACTLY what it is talking
about?
Doug "The fundamental illusion we're admonished to recognize is that
of guilt and sin. Clearly neither are "physical things" but "mental
things" or pure idea and interpretation."
~ I hear on the news there was a school shoot-out up your way. I
understand that the shooter was shot and killed by the police. Are
you saying that the police acted improperly?
Doug paragraph (1) "I think it is a huge diversion from the important
message to worry about whether that tree over there is "real" or "an
illusion." The only point at which it matters is that if you start
thinking the tree is the illusion then you start to think of it as
evil and then you start to see it as your problem. The tree is not
your problem, your mind is your problem! And as for the tree, what
ACIM tells us to do with it is "see the face of Christ" in it!
Doug paragraph (2) The basic Christian idea (not contradicted in ACIM)
that The "world" (material universe) is "good" because God created it
is reflected in ACIM many times, "see the face of Christ in every
living thing" and even "God is in the Wastebasket." Space, time and
matter were created as "teaching devices for your mind" ... and they
have a Holy purpose however "illusory" they might be."
~ Why is it that in your paragraph (2) you immediately proceed to do
what you described in paragraph (1) as being "a huge diversion"?
Doug "And we know, of course, that our physical senses perceive
"stuff" in very odd ways! They are "normal" to us, but in fact that
steel door is 99% (or more) empty space! So is your hand! Other than
the empty space there are just little swirls of energy which, so far
as anyone knows, ARE eternal! Einstein pointed out that time seems
linear only because of our sensory apparatus. The door appears solid
only because of our sensory apparatus. Time is not linear and the door
is mostly empty space. We know that from Physics."
~ I think your physics is mostly full of shit here. Run full speed
into a clean piece of plate glass that you can't see and don't know is
there, and get back to me. Solid is solid because of the
electromagnetic force, whether you perceive it or not. The space
isn't empty. It is full of electromagnetism.
Doug "So IN THAT SENSE you (and me) constructed the experience of a
"solid door" in our minds using perceptual data delivered by the body,
and our notion of the door as solid is an illusion, albeit a NECESSARY
one so long as we're in bodies! We made up the idea of the door being
solid. We didn't make up the door! Or the billions of galaxies in
the universe ..."
~ I hope you didn't write anything interesting beyond this point.
Tom
form but is talking about the world of our thoughts, which where there
is of course no buildings."
~ I think most architects would disagree.
Sheryl Valentine
form but is talking about the world of our thoughts, which where there
is of course no buildings."
tom:~ I think most architects would disagree.
sv: well yeah, in that sense, I concur ;) sheryl
--
www.SherylValentine.com
www.sherylvalentine.blogspot.com
"Tom" <tom...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:pfbhg2lklhui8a169...@4ax.com...
Sheryl Valentine
understand that the shooter was shot and killed by the police. Are
you saying that the police acted improperly?
sv: Okay Tom, forgive me, I know you find these conversations with me
exasperating, to say the least ;) -- but what you say here seems to be
differnt than what yous ay when we're discussing physical illness. A
"shoot-out" in the world of form is no different than a bodily illness. It
seems to me that you're giving one more importance than another in that, how
is the police responding to a shoot-out different from a health care
professional responding to a patient in physical pain? Sheryl
--
www.SherylValentine.com
www.sherylvalentine.blogspot.com
"Tom" <tom...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:at8hg2952uh46bddp...@4ax.com...
Tom
understand that the shooter was shot and killed by the police. Are
you saying that the police acted improperly?
Sheryl "Okay Tom, forgive me, I know you find these conversations
with me exasperating, to say the least ;) -- but what you say here
seems to be differnt than what yous ay when we're discussing physical
illness. A "shoot-out" in the world of form is no different than a
bodily illness. It seems to me that you're giving one more
importance than another in that, how is the police responding to a
shoot-out different from a health care professional responding to a
patient in physical pain?"
~ That's got to be one of the strangest things I've read today. You
consider a shoot-out to be no different than a head cold?
~ Please elaborate.
Sheryl Valentine
consider a shoot-out to be no different than a head cold?
~ Please elaborate.
sv: ha/ha -- I knew you'd bust me! lol! but really, *anything* that happens
in the world of form can be interpreted with the ego or the hs, right? What
I'm saying is that the things that occur in this world and how we
*individually* respond to them are all the same. Make this year different
by making it all the same, says the Course. I'm just saying that responding
to the 'ills' of this world take all different forms. Does that make sense,
yeah I'll bet not! ;) sheryl
--
www.SherylValentine.com
www.sherylvalentine.blogspot.com
"Tom" <tom...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:oldhg29rsq49lcps5...@4ax.com...
Tom
You consider a shoot-out to be no different than a head cold?
~ Please elaborate.
sv: ha/ha -- I knew you'd bust me! lol! but really, *anything* that
happens in the world of form can be interpreted with the ego or the
hs, right? What I'm saying is that the things that occur in this
world and how we *individually* respond to them are all the same.
Make this year different by making it all the same, says the Course.
I'm just saying that responding to the 'ills' of this world take all
different forms. Does that make sense, yeah I'll bet not! ;)"
~ You are concerned about how to respond to events you consider to be
beyond your influence or control. A totally passive point of view.
Miracle workers are not passive. Listen, learn, do.
Sheryl Valentine
beyond your influence or control. A totally passive point of view.
Miracle workers are not passive. Listen, learn, do.
sv: No, that's not what I'm saying at all. I totally live "listen,learn,
do." Even in my role as a doctor. ;) Sheryl
--
www.SherylValentine.com
www.sherylvalentine.blogspot.com
"Tom" <tom...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:itehg2tpf742egdtu...@4ax.com...
Tom
"listen,learn, do." Even in my role as a doctor"
~ I'm really glad to hear that. What were we talking about?
I'm going to bed now, anyway.
Sheryl Valentine
"listen,learn, do." Even in my role as a doctor"
tom:~ I'm really glad to hear that. What were we talking about?
I'm going to bed now, anyway.
sv: good nite - sweet dreams ;)
--
www.SherylValentine.com
www.sherylvalentine.blogspot.com
"Tom" <tom...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:6qghg21o1vkhtitan...@4ax.com...
Nancy
Tom wrote:
> Nancy "I don't think it's possible to actually
> "answer" criticism of this sort because
> its fundamental (and invisible) premise
> is the existence of relative value, whereas
> the teachings of the course are based
> on an absence of relative value."
> ~ Would you classify this as a
> philosophy of detachment?
No. You can't be detached from those
with whom you are one.
> Wars, death,
> and destruction continue as usual,
This is true. The course tells us that
what is not love is fear. All these are
manifestations of fear. I take the course
teachings on helpfulness, forgiveness,
the unacceptability of anger, and, above
all, the importance of FOLLOWING the
HS, quite literally because what hurts
one of us hurts us all.
> but your aim is to remove yourself
> from having any opinions about it.
My aim is to be aware when I'm operating
from my opinions and to be humble
enough to remember that, because my
opinions are fallable, I need HELP. Con-
stant, consistent HELP, in correcting
them. Most of my opinions, in one way
or another, reflect my very human
difficulty with forgiveness. So I have to
keep asking and asking. After more
than a quarter century of this, btw, I
truly see and treasure the blessings of
forgiveness. This does not mean, though,
that I don't still need HELP.
> If it is neither good nor bad for
> other people to drop the bombs,
Remember what the course says? It
says attack has NO foundation. None.
Because I have chosen to take the
course's teachings in this area literally
and apply them to the world I'm exper-
iencing, I am a peace activist.
> what difference might it make if you
> were to drop a few yourself?
That would be a real departure for me,
because I try not to kill anything. Including
bugs. This has been much easier since
I've moved to a highrise apartment. And
I try to nurture all life - which could explain
why my pet food bill is so high.
Nancy
Richard @ Tahoe
"You who believe that God is fear made but one substitution. It has
taken many forms, because it was the substitution of illusion for
truth; of fragmentation for wholeness. It has become so splintered and
subdivided and divided again, over and over, that it is now almost
impossible to perceive it once was one, and still is what it was. That
one error, which brought truth to illusion, infinity to time, and life
to death, was all you ever made. Your whole world rests upon it.
Everything you see reflects it, and every special relationship that
you have ever made is part of it.
"You may be surprised to hear how very different is reality from what
you see. You do not realize the magnitude of that one error. It was so
vast and so completely incredible that from it a world of total
unreality <had> to emerge. What else could come of it? Its fragmented
aspects are fearful enough, as you begin to look at them. But nothing
you have seen begins to show you the enormity of the original error,
which seemed to cast you out of Heaven, to shatter knowledge into
meaningless bits of disunited perceptions, and to force you to make
further substitutions.
"That was the first projection of error outward. The world arose to
hide it, and became the screen on which it was projected and drawn
between you and the truth. For truth extends inward, where the idea of
loss is meaningless and only increase is conceivable. Do you really
think it strange that a world in which everything is backwards and
upside down arose from this projection of error? It was inevitable.
For truth brought to this could only remain within in quiet, and take
no part in all the mad projection by which this world was made. Call
it not sin but madness, for such it was and so it still remains.
Invest it not with guilt, for guilt implies it was accomplished in
reality. And above all, <be not afraid of it>".
(T-18.I.4. thru T-18.I.6.)
Richard
Pieter
Tom schreef:
I was speaking of what the
body's physical senses perceive
in the physical world outside of the body.
Tom
> philosophy of detachment?
Nancy "No. You can't be detached from those
with whom you are one."
~ That is rather not the point at all. You wrote:
"If the world of phenomena is illusory --
something created by Mind or mind --
and if it is viewed in the present without
judgment -- it acquires a sort of "perfection"
in that it loses its relative position."
~ Are you suggesting that dropping bombs has a "sort of perfection"
when seen properly?
Tom
> separation would be real.
> That anything I perceive outside
> of me has nothing to do with me,
> unless I establish a rapport with it;
> that then is a "special relationship".
>
>
> ~ How do you know what is "outside" of you and what is not?
Pieter "I was speaking of what the
body's physical senses perceive
in the physical world outside of the body."
~ I don't understand what you are talking about. If perception is an
out-picturing of an inner condition, as the Course says, how is it
possible that "anything I perceive outside of me has nothing to do
with me unless . . . . "
~ It would seem that what you perceive outside of you has everything
to do with you, regardless of whether you "establish a rapport with
it."
Lee
What would you say distinguishes one from the
other, Tom?
Deborah2
Tom wrote:
> > Pieter "The dream just is that
> > separation would be real.
> > That anything I perceive outside
> > of me has nothing to do with me,
> > unless I establish a rapport with it;
> > that then is a "special relationship".
> >
> >
> > ~ How do you know what is "outside" of you and what is not?
>
> Pieter "I was speaking of what the
> body's physical senses perceive
> in the physical world outside of the body."
>
>
> ~ I don't understand what you are talking about. If perception is an
> out-picturing of an inner condition, as the Course says, how is it
> possible that "anything I perceive outside of me has nothing to do
> with me unless . . . . "
The body outside of you isn't the perception you create. "About" the
body outside of you IS the perception you create.
> ~ It would seem that what you perceive outside of you has everything
> to do with you, regardless of whether you "establish a rapport with
> it."
To me it is about the relationship and rapport has to do with the
relationship.
~Deborah
Tom
is the same thing as the "real world."
Lee "What would you say distinguishes one from the other, Tom?"
~ I think the purpose of the Course is to "set the direction," and so
it is at its clearest, and most useful, when it is discussing the
lowest levels of the ladder. It gets progressively more vague as it
discusses the successively higher levels, until it reaches a point
where, expressly, words totally fail.
~ The "real world" is the world of spirit, as God created it. It is
described as an "illusion" because it is perceived rather than known.
Nevertheless, the "real world" is totally different from the everyday
world of our experience seemingly from within gross bodies.
~ To make a long story short, direct, sustained and exclusive
awareness of the real world seems impossible while maintaining any
identification with a corporeal body. While seemingly within a body,
the "happy dream" is as good as it gets.
Tom
"About" the body outside of you IS the perception you create."
~ I perceive my own body, don't you?
Tom
as it gets."
~ Another way to look at the issue is to ask the question, "Where is
Jesus?"
Nancy
Tom wrote:
> > ~ Would you classify this as a
> > philosophy of detachment?
>
> Nancy "No. You can't be detached from those
> with whom you are one."
~ That is rather not the point at all. You wrote:
For me, that IS the point -- no "rather" about
it -- and also a natural answer to the quesion,
"Would you classify this as a philosophy of
detachment."
> "If the world of phenomena is illusory --
> something created by Mind or mind --
> and if it is viewed in the present without
> judgment -- it acquires a sort of "perfection"
> in that it loses its relative position."
> ~ Are you suggesting that dropping
> bombs has a "sort of perfection"
I think that "perfection" was the result
of a poor choice of words, which is
why I apologized in advance for my
inexperience in communicating about
these topics. Let me try again. What
I meant by "perfection" was the state
the HS shows us when we ask to
share His View -- which, to me, is
seen with consciousness only in
the present, without the ego's constant
chatter about it. In that state, the
dropping and experiencing the dropping
of bombs can be seen as suffering
arising from fear, experienced by God's
children, who HAVE forgotten their
perfection. In that state, also, one
can be -- no, "I" can be -- receptive
to the Guidance of the HS as to
what thoughts and behavior would be
most helpful. And also (this truly
blows me away) we are -- I am --
given whatever resources and
strength are necessary to implement
the Guidance received.
> when seen properly?
I'm not sure I'd use the word "properly",
because this implies that there is a
way to see that I can achieve on my
own -- which I certainly can't. I'd use
the phrase "with the Holy Spirit",
instead.
Nancy
Deborah2
Sure, I perceive my own body.
I can also change my perception about my body. I perceived it to look
fattish to me at a time it was actually very very thin. I didn't at
all perceive what others perceived until one day I met my image in the
mirror when my mind was clear. I suddenly saw what others were trying
to tell me.
My body exists here in this dimension regardless how I perceive it.
Paralysed people can not feel their limbs... they still exist.
I could be misunderstanding you. Are you saying your body doesn't
exist but only by your percepton?
~Deborah
Sharon
Good stuff Tom. Or at least from my perspective. Hope it isn't too
scary that I agree with you. :-) Plus, I like your
thought-provoking dialog these last few days. Wow.. gives me lots to
ponder. :-)
In linear time, I see the real world at the very end of our "need" for
perception. The "happy dreams" is means for reaching this point.
I'm shooting from the hip here, but from what I gather is that the
real world is seen *only* with Vision, so it a "world of spirit" so to
speak, as you said. Both perceptions are laid down before us, so
we see the whole picture, not just fragments of it. We see what is
false and what is true, and the choice becomes unmistakable because
Vision shows us that what is false, can only remain false, and what is
true is true. Long story short, at this "point" we choose only what
is true, or Heaven. It is the gateway, or the final step. It is
reflection of perfection.
Sharon
Sharon
>
> ~ Are you suggesting that dropping bombs has a "sort of perfection"
> when seen properly?
Hi again Tom,
I'm going to jump in here.. because this triggered something in me
that I wanted to share. Your conversation with Nancy and her point
has nothing to do with my response, just my own perspective I wanted
to bring into this thread.
I had a unusual sort of thing happen when my father's body ceased to
function a few month ago. (I don't like to say "he died" because I
know that it was his body.. but Spirit lives on, as it always will).
The whole event from the standpoint of my physical eyes and so-called
"rational and thinking" mind was terrible and very hard to take. It
was a nightmare, and something that I would have given anything to
escape from. But, yet, in the midst of all of it, there was a
Perfection happening, that went beyond what my physical eyes "saw" and
my "rational" mind could understand. Major point being, that it was
completely independent of the physical event, IN AND OF ITSELF. It
was reveled to me at this moment, but it could have been any other
time as well. What triggered it, I believe, is that I released my
last little vestiges of grievances and completely forgave my father.
I could extend my love to him unconditionally and without reservation.
And in those last 3 days with him, I gave him *everything* emotionally
and spiritually. I did not see him apart from me. This was my gift
to him AND to myself. And during this, I was given a glimpse of
eternity.
I had a flash, if you will, of His perfect plan, and it become very
clear to me that this plan was behind and beyond *everything* I "see"
with my physical eyes. No matter how terrible the event I "witness",
it is still there. No exceptions. It's His Answer to everything,
and it never fails us. It brought me comfort, healing and made what
would have been a terrible event, a wonder blessing. A true gift.
I believe it was a glimpse of the real world, and the perfection that
is laid down right next to it's alternative.
What does this have to do with dropping bombs and a sort of
perfection? Well.. what we see happening does not change His perfect
plan, or the real world. His plan is independent of worldly laws,
reasoning and events. It's is unshakable, perfect, and cannot be
altered.
Love,
Sharon
theNewAgeSite
> The Course is meant to awaken
> the dreamers of the dream of separation.
What dreamers are you actually talking about? I often find the
terminology used by ACIM advocates to be somewhat puzzling. If I
understand ACIM correctly then these dreamers don't really exist. They
are all completely unreal.
Now if that is true, that is, if all that we incorrectly believe is
reality is nothing but a dream that the Son is experiencing, then only
the Son actually has a "will" and is the sole creator of the dream.
If that is so then none of these "threads" in the dream ("threads of
the dream" that falsely imagine they are someone) has any "will"
separate from the Son - the dreamer. Therefore if that is true, then
the individual "dreamers" ("threads" in the dream of the one dreamer)
have no ability to make any real decision to awaken whatsoever. They
are simply "threads" in a complex dream that is "willed" by one entity
- the Son.
Therefore only the Son can awaken from the dream of separation.
Therefore it would seem to me that even your imagined decision as an
ACI M student to work towards this awakening is really just an illusion
that your thoughts or imagined decisions actually have any affect on
anything.
To use an analogy, you are nothing more the flickering of an image on a
movie projection screen - nothing you think or do is actually
determined by you. You don't exist and are nothing but one of billions
of projections created by the one real, and true dreamer.
Therefore nothing you think, do, say, or even imagine that you decide
means anything because you are not the one that is "willing" the
picture on that screen.
best regards,
Lawrence Kennon
http://www.theNewAgeSite.com
Sheryl Valentine
clear to me that this plan was behind and beyond *everything* I "see"
with my physical eyes. No matter how terrible the event I "witness",
it is still there. No exceptions. It's His Answer to everything,
and it never fails us. It brought me comfort, healing and made what
would have been a terrible event, a wonder blessing. A true gift.
I believe it was a glimpse of the real world, and the perfection that
is laid down right next to it's alternative.
sv: yes, great post. I've had similiar experiences as well. What helps me
is to keep in mind that there is a bigger picture, a greater plan, that we
just can't see or truly know from this level of existance but as we trust In
God's vision we can bring healing to ourselves and this world. Even the
bible says that "we know in part". I believe that this is a benevolent
universe and though it appears not to be, as we learn these lessons within
it we truly come to know this truth, imo, of course. Sheryl
--
www.SherylValentine.com
www.sherylvalentine.blogspot.com
"Sharon" <blue...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:-KydnaI7sbmoDZTY...@comcast.com...
Sheryl Valentine
movie projection screen - nothing you think or do is actually
determined by you. You don't exist and are nothing but one of billions
of projections created by the one real, and true dreamer.
Therefore nothing you think, do, say, or even imagine that you decide
means anything because you are not the one that is "willing" the
picture on that screen.
sv: but this is not what ACIM teaches. It doesn't teach us that we are
flickering images on a movie screen, rather, and more profoundly it teachers
us that our mind is the *projector* of the movie on the screen. In our movie
we can see a world of hate/fear/attack or one where all things and
experiences can be used to bring us home to the Truth that we are Love.
Sheryl
--
www.SherylValentine.com
www.sherylvalentine.blogspot.com
"theNewAgeSite" <thenew...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1158254852....@d34g2000cwd.googlegroups.com...
Sniper
So would you say, using your ladder analogy,
that "the real world", is actually along the
same lines as "the happy dream", just higher
up the ladder, so to speak?
Sharon
"Pieter" <hrdo...@zonnet.nl> wrote in message
news:1158236839....@p79g2000cwp.googlegroups.com...
I would offer that even the body that is perceiving this physical
world with it's physical eyes, is being projected "outside" of the
shared mind.
Let me clarify, that by "outside", I mean it is *believed* to have
left it's source. So, this is speaking of our belief, not the truth.
What we perceive as being outside of us is actually an outward
reflection of an inward condition. Thoughts do not leave their
source. That is why changing our mind, changes the world we see.
If what I perceive as "outside" of me truly has nothing to do with my
mind (or "me"), then this would mean that the impossible happened, and
I "made" something that left it's source and now exists as a separate
entity of some sort. This principle is also why we could not have
left Heaven. :)
Sharon, as a body/personality is not the central focus point of this
shared mind (although it seems that way to me! lol) and only offers
another perspective/perception from the shared mind. To explain
better, here is an analogy of the mind; take a disco ball, it is
one, but has many different mirrors and angles to reflect "outside" of
itself. But it's all an optical illusion; because it remains as one.
If you were looking from the stand point of one mirror on the ball,
you would think that there was no ball, only the reflection that you
saw. From the perspective of that one mirror, you would see a
different perception than another mirror. But, every reflection, no
matter how different, is from the one ball, and has not left it's
source. In fact, the optical illusion was made so that we would not
"see" the real source (the shared, one mind) and to believe that the
reflection we see has left Heaven, and is outside of our own mind.
Just want to say this so I'm no misunderstood here. :) This doesn't
mean that we are not real, because we never left our Source. The
essence of who we are is real, but the way in which the mind is
perceiving is a trick and showing us fragmentation and separation.
Wow.. I'm talkative today. Thanks for all of you that got this far.
:) I could be wrong, but this is how I understand it today. Thanks
for listening, ya'll. :-)
Sharon
Deborah2
Sharon wrote:
> What does this have to do with dropping bombs and a sort of
> perfection? Well.. what we see happening does not change His perfect
> plan, or the real world. His plan is independent of worldly laws,
> reasoning and events. It's is unshakable, perfect, and cannot be
> altered.
This is what I understand as well. Yet we have a responsibility to
live with "life matters".
~Deborah
Sharon
"Deborah2" <n.spa...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1158257800....@e3g2000cwe.googlegroups.com...
Thanks Deborah, I hear you. I hope you will not take this the wrong
way, because what you expressed is fine. I want to add a few
thoughts, and present another angle of seeing this.
I believe that *if* we are looking at the world with His vision, and
see the perfect plan beyond everything, we cannot help but live life
like it matters to us; because we are living in love, not fear. Love
matters to us, because we *are* love. And when we remember we are
love, we extend it.
So... I get a little stuck on the words "we have a responsibility"
because it gives the impression that it is a should or a shouldn't,
and could be used as a guilt thing, imo. I look at extending love as
a natural expression of seeing the world with His vision, because it
can be no other way. And of course, this spills over into the world
we see, or our life, because ideas don't leave their source. :-)
Sharon
Sheryl Valentine
see the perfect plan beyond everything, we cannot help but live life like it
matters to us; because we are living in love, not fear. Love
matters to us, because we *are* love. And when we remember we are
love, we extend it.
sv: yes, I see it this way as well. sheryl--
www.SherylValentine.com
www.sherylvalentine.blogspot.com
"Sharon" <blue...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:jZednddEL8NtPZTY...@comcast.com...
Deborah2
Responsibility means... we have an ability to respond.
That may help you to read it without thinking guilty thoughts.
What do you think?
~Deborah
Sharon
> Responsibility means... we have an ability to respond.
Ok.. let me put that into perspective in what you said again:
You said:
"Yet we have a responsibility to live with "life matters".
So.. are you saying then that we have an ability to respond to life in
a way in which "life matters"? If that's what you are saying, I
agree that we have an ability to choose with love or fear. If we
choose to extend love, then everything "matters" because it is a part
of us.
>
> That may help you to read it without thinking guilty thoughts.
It sounded like a you should-shouldn't type of statement, and yes, I
get stuck on that. :) Don't know if it's about guilty thoughts, but
just something that doesn't always ring true for me when I hear it.
Not saying it's not valid, just my own opinion here.
>
> What do you think?
I think I understand where you are coming from now.
Sharon
Doug Thompson
>
> > ~ Kindly account for the following:
> >
> > "The real world is not like this. It has no buildings, and there are
> > no streets where people walk alone and separate. There are no stores
> > where people buy an endless list of things they do not need. It is
> not lit with artificial light, and night comes not upon it. There is
> no day that brightens and grows dim. There is no loss. Nothing is
> there but shines, and shines forever. The world YOU see must be
> DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision."
> >
>
> Doug "I think I said "the worlds" ACIM discusses aren't "anything
> physical per se at all." With a VERY few possible exceptions when the
> "world" may refer to something physical, as in "God so loved the world
> He gave it TO his Son."
>
> ~ You are saying that God loved the physical world? That makes no
> sense at all.
Perhaps it makes no sense _to you_ but it's not the only time the Course
tells us that God loves the "world." It appears to make perfectly good
sense to Jesus :)
"The gift that He has given
you is more than anything that stands this side of Heaven. The instant for
its
recognition is at hand. Join your awareness to what has been ALREADY joined.
The faith you give each other can accomplish this. For He Who loves the
world
is seeing it for you, without one spot of sin upon it, and in the innocence
which makes the sight of it as beautiful as Heaven." T XXI D 9 (585)
That code means HLC Text, chapter XXXI, Section D, paragraph 9, page 585 of
the original manuscript.
Also of relevance:
"9. We once said that God so loved the world that He gave it to His
only-begotten Son. God DOES love the real world, and those who perceive ITS
reality cannot SEE the world of death. For death is NOT of the real world,
in
which everything is eternal. God gave you the real world in exchange for the
one you made out of your split mind, and which IS the symbol of death. For
if
you could REALLY separate yourselves from the Mind of God you WOULD die, and
the
world you perceive IS a world of separation." T XI D 9 (289)
Again:
"11. There is a light which this world cannot give. Yet YOU can give it, as
it
was given you. And as you give it, it shines forth to call you from the
world
and follow it. For this light will attract you as nothing in this world can
do.
And you will lay aside the world and find another. This other world is
bright
with love which YOU have given it. And here will everything remind you of
your
Father and his Holy Son. Light is unlimited, and spreads across this world
in
quiet joy. All those you brought with you will shine on you, and you will
shine
on them in gratitude because they brought you here. Your light will join
with
theirs in power so compelling that it will draw the others out of darkness
as
you look on them." T XII F 11 (329)
And again:
"7. It is God's Will that nothing touch His Son except Himself, and nothing
else
comes nigh unto him. He is as safe from pain as God Himself, Who watches
over
him in everything. The world about him shines with love because God placed
him
in Himself where pain is not, and love surrounds him without end or flaw.
Disturbance of his peace can never be. In perfect sanity he looks on love,
for
it is all about him and within him. He MUST deny the world of pain the
instant
he perceives the arms of love around him. And from this point of safety he
looks quietly about him, and recognizes that the world is one with him." T
XII G 7 (331)
And then:
"1. The world as YOU perceive it cannot have been created by the Father, for
the
world is NOT as you see it. God created ONLY the eternal, and everything you
see is perishable. Therefore, there must be another world which you do NOT
see.
The Bible speaks of a NEW Heaven and a NEW earth, yet this cannot be
literally
true, for the eternal are not RE-created. To perceive ANEW is merely to
perceive AGAIN, implying that before, or in the interval, you were not
perceiving AT ALL. What, then, is the world that awaits your perception when
you SEE it?" T X H 1 (274)
The point is that God loves the "world" and the distinctoin being made
between the "two worlds" is not that one is "physical" and the other isn't
physical, but that one is "correctly perceived" and the other ISN'T! The
"physicality" isn't the issue, the attitude and judgement and point of view
we bring to bear on our perceptions of "the world" is the issue.
So I think it should be clear now that we need to be careful with this word
"world" and not assume that it ALWAYS refers to something physical, or
planet earth, or the physical universe. In fact it almost NEVER refers to
that, but rather to perceptions of that, illusory mis-perceptions which make
up the "ego's world" and correct, true, forgiving and loving perceptions
which make up the Holy Spirit's world, or the world God loves.
Again, the distinction here has nothing to do with physicality. We are not
talking about two different planets. We are talking about two ways of
seeing one and the same planet.
>
> Doug "I think the quote you cited takes a few more words to say
> EXACTLY the same thing. It's not talking about physical stuff, either
> man-made (artificial light) or natural (no day and night) but "mental
> stuff" if you will."
>
> ~ How can you say that the above quote is not talking about streets,
> buildings, day, and night, when that is EXACTLY what it is talking
> about?
I can say that because it says it's NOT talking about what you mistakenly
think it is talking about! The "real world" does not consist of " ... the
physical stuff ..."
>
> Doug "The fundamental illusion we're admonished to recognize is that
> of guilt and sin. Clearly neither are "physical things" but "mental
> things" or pure idea and interpretation."
>
> ~ I hear on the news there was a school shoot-out up your way. I
> understand that the shooter was shot and killed by the police. Are
> you saying that the police acted improperly?
No.
>
> Doug paragraph (1) "I think it is a huge diversion from the important
> message to worry about whether that tree over there is "real" or "an
> illusion." The only point at which it matters is that if you start
> thinking the tree is the illusion then you start to think of it as
> evil and then you start to see it as your problem. The tree is not
> your problem, your mind is your problem! And as for the tree, what
> ACIM tells us to do with it is "see the face of Christ" in it!
>
> Doug paragraph (2) The basic Christian idea (not contradicted in ACIM)
> that The "world" (material universe) is "good" because God created it
> is reflected in ACIM many times, "see the face of Christ in every
> living thing" and even "God is in the Wastebasket." Space, time and
> matter were created as "teaching devices for your mind" ... and they
> have a Holy purpose however "illusory" they might be."
>
> ~ Why is it that in your paragraph (2) you immediately proceed to do
> what you described in paragraph (1) as being "a huge diversion"?
Um ... were you overtired when you wrote this message? Your question makes
no sense.
> Doug "And we know, of course, that our physical senses perceive
> "stuff" in very odd ways! They are "normal" to us, but in fact that
> steel door is 99% (or more) empty space! So is your hand! Other than
> the empty space there are just little swirls of energy which, so far
> as anyone knows, ARE eternal! Einstein pointed out that time seems
> linear only because of our sensory apparatus. The door appears solid
> only because of our sensory apparatus. Time is not linear and the door
> is mostly empty space. We know that from Physics."
>
> ~ I think your physics is mostly full of shit here. Run full speed
> into a clean piece of plate glass that you can't see and don't know is
> there, and get back to me. Solid is solid because of the
> electromagnetic force, whether you perceive it or not. The space
> isn't empty. It is full of electromagnetism.
Read some physics. Particles smaller than the inter-molecular spaces, like
X-Rays and neutrons slip through the steel quite well! The reason your body
doesn't is because it is bigger than the inter-molecular spaces. The reason
light reflects off it rather than passing through it is that the light waves
are bigger than the inter-molecular spaces. So your sensory apparatus here,
your hands, feel the steel (or glass) as solid because they are bigger than
the "holes" ... but it's still 99.9999% holes with only a trace of
"electromagnetism" as you call it ... swirls of energy known as atoms which
form into molecules which, because our sensory apparatus is also made of
molecules, APPEAR to be solid to our senses.
Physics has known this since the late 19th Century ... that "matter" is
mostly "holes" and more recently we've learned that the "solid bits" (atoms)
are not physical particles of stuff at all, but swirls of energy. "Solid"
objects APPEAR to be solid as a function of our sense organs, not as a
function of their actual nature. The "solidity" is an illusion, albeit a
necessary one bodies to heed! :) In the same way it is an "illusion" every
time the "sun comes up." In fact the sun doesn't ever come up, the planet
just spins us from its dark side to its light side once a day. We put maps
on square pieces of paper and see a "flat" earth around us, but in fact it
is the surface of a sphere. The way things "seem" to be to our senses isn't
always the way they "really are" ...
>
> Doug "So IN THAT SENSE you (and me) constructed the experience of a
> "solid door" in our minds using perceptual data delivered by the body,
> and our notion of the door as solid is an illusion, albeit a NECESSARY
> one so long as we're in bodies! We made up the idea of the door being
> solid. We didn't make up the door! Or the billions of galaxies in
> the universe ..."
>
> ~ I hope you didn't write anything interesting beyond this point.
Ah, your hopes are dashed yet again :) You clearly totally missed the point
I was trying to make ... I guess I need to learn to write more clearly or
stop worrying about people whose attention spans can't get beyond the fifth
paragraph.
The point was that Renard, in characterizing the "world" as "The Kingdom of
Suckdom," (which is a thoroughly Wapnickian perspective) has entirely missed
the point that it is ONLY "sucky" from the misperceptions of the ego! To
God and to us when we can look on a forgiven world, it is lovely, indeed it
is the "gate of heaven." The "suckdom" is the illusion, not the molecules!
All the best,
Doug
Doug Thompson
routinely contrasts the "nightmare" with the "happy dream" and "the world as
ego sees it" with "the real world" in which there is only joy.
The "unhappy dream" or "nightmare" is "the world as ego sees it."
The "happy dream" is "the real world."
The terms are used interchangeably. Except for the fact that you've judged
"the real world" to be unattainable (it's not) you'd recognize that.
The real world is not nearly so unattainable or different from your
'everyday' world as you suppose. All you need do is look with love rather
than judgement and grievance, and you experience it until you start to
succumb to grievances and judgements again. The difference lies not in the
molecules but in the attitude you bring to your perceptions. When you look
with love and forgiveness you see the good, the holy, and you are filled
with joy and then you know you're in the real world! When you look with
judgement and grievance, you "perceive" something different!
There is a common practice among adherents of many religions that when the
"promises" of their Scripture don't materialize in their experiences, they
re-interpret the Scripture to fit their experience rather than recognizing
what's really going on!
The fact that YOU aren't experiencing the "real world" is not a reason for
me to disbelieve my own experience of it! :):)
"Tom" <tom...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:oruig2pecp52jv00n...@4ax.com...
> > ~ There's no good reason I know of to think that the "happy dream"
> is the same thing as the "real world."
>
>
> Lee "What would you say distinguishes one from the other, Tom?"
>
>
> ~ I think the purpose of the Course is to "set the direction," and so
> it is at its clearest, and most useful, when it is discussing the
> lowest levels of the ladder. It gets progressively more vague as it
> discusses the successively higher levels, until it reaches a point
> where, expressly, words totally fail.
>
> ~ The "real world" is the world of spirit, as God created it. It is
> described as an "illusion" because it is perceived rather than known.
> Nevertheless, the "real world" is totally different from the everyday
> world of our experience seemingly from within gross bodies.
<Shaking head> These two "worlds" are just different ways of perceiving:
you see a "guilty" world or you see a "forgiven" world and while we may be
habituated to oen or the other, we ALWAYS have the choice of which we wish
to see!
>
> ~ To make a long story short, direct, sustained and exclusive
> awareness of the real world seems impossible while maintaining any
> identification with a corporeal body. While seemingly within a body,
> the "happy dream" is as good as it gets.
The happy dream is the real world :)
In the real world you are having a happy dream! Are you having a happy
dream? That's the real world. IF you're NOT having a happy dream, and it
is clear that right now you're intensely unhappy and seeing a very guilty,
mistaken world rather than a forgiven world, then you're not in the real
world. The fact that you've chosen NOT to perceive it does not mean it is
not there to be perceived for those who make a different choice! :)
Pieter
Tom schreef:
> > Pieter "The dream just is that
> > separation would be real.
> > That anything I perceive outside
> > of me has nothing to do with me,
> > unless I establish a rapport with it;
> > that then is a "special relationship".
> >
> >
> > ~ How do you know what is "outside" of you and what is not?
>
> Pieter "I was speaking of what the
> body's physical senses perceive
> in the physical world outside of the body."
>
>
> ~ I don't understand what you are talking about. If perception is an
> out-picturing of an inner condition, as the Course says, how is it
> possible that "anything I perceive outside of me has nothing to do
> with me unless . . . . "
I am speaking of the dream;
the ego kind of thinking,
which one follows if one
identifies with the body, and
believes in separation.
> ~ It would seem that what you perceive outside of you has everything
> to do with you, regardless of whether you "establish a rapport with
> it."
Yes, dear Tom, I know that.
Deborah2
Sharon wrote:
> "Deborah2" <n.spa...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:1158261060....@e3g2000cwe.googlegroups.com...
> > Responsibility means... we have an ability to respond.
>
>
> Ok.. let me put that into perspective in what you said again:
>
>
> You said:
> "Yet we have a responsibility to live with "life matters".
>
>
> So.. are you saying then that we have an ability to respond to life in
> a way in which "life matters"? If that's what you are saying, I
> agree that we have an ability to choose with love or fear. If we
> choose to extend love, then everything "matters" because it is a part
> of us.
Yes, we can choose to respond to life in ways that affirm life. Like
Jesus says in the urtext.... 'to always support life, you never know
when God will tell someone to get up and walk'. We have that ability to
respond in life in life affirming ways... bottom line, love, and
affect in synch with the definition of the real world.
Everything matters because it is a part of us, because we affect
everything in "everything" we do.
> > That may help you to read it without thinking guilty thoughts.
>
>
> It sounded like a you should-shouldn't type of statement, and yes, I
> get stuck on that. :) Don't know if it's about guilty thoughts, but
> just something that doesn't always ring true for me when I hear it.
> Not saying it's not valid, just my own opinion here.
Responsibility has been used that way in our society. It is such a
gift to see the word in a really proactive positive light...... our
ability to respond. A gift from "Matthew Fox" in his book "Original
Blessing".
I realize you were not trying to invalidate me, as I wasn't trying to
do to you.
> > What do you think?
>
>
> I think I understand where you are coming from now.
I think so too... :)
Thanks
~Deborah
theNewAgeSite
"[ACIM] doesn't teach us that we are flickering images on a movie
screen, rather, and more profoundly it teaches us that our mind is the
*projector* of the movie on the screen. In our movie we can see a world
of hate/fear/attack or one where all things and experiences can be used
to bring us home to the Truth that we are Love."
ACIM may not explicitly teach that we are "flickering images on a movie
screen" as I described in my analogy. However I do believe that the
premises of ACIM very stongly imply this.
On p. 23/24 of The Disappearance of the Universe there is this dialog:
Gary: "Is my mind projecting you, or is it just your mind?"
Arten: "The question is misplaced because there is only one mind."
If Gary Renard in his book accurately describes what ACIM teaches, then
there is only one mind, not a plural "we" as in "we can see a world of
hate/fear/attack." If there is a "we" that is in any sense real in this
scenario then the Son who is dreaming the dream is the most incredible
case of multiple personality imaginable. Otherwise (if the Son isn't a
collection of billions of unique personalities) the "dreamers" are in
fact as I described - unreal projections on a movie screen.
On p. 33 of the same book he writes:
Arten: "One of the things he [Jesus] had to realize was not only that
the universe doesn't exist, but that he didn't exist on any level other
than pure spirit. ... It's terrifying to all people on an unconscious
level because it means the relinquishment of any individuality or
personal identity, now and forever."
Again it seems that Renard is painting a picture where no individual
personal identity exists in reality. There is no "we" other than God
and the Son. At best we are imaginary "threads" in the dream of the
dreamer as I described previously.
My real criticism of ACIM is that essentially it is incoherent. By
that I mean that it has separate teachings that may be comprehensible
in some fashion individually, but they cannot be logically integrated
into a consistent whole without contradiction.
On the one hand it teaches the unreality of what we think we perceive,
but then teaches that we ought to do certain things (love, forgiveness,
etc.). Now it must be one way or the other. Either the existence we
believe we perceive is in some way "real," or it is not. If it is not
real then nothing in the un-reality makes any difference. It is
un-real. It is only if it is "real" that the concept of what one "ought
to do" makes sense.
ACIM teaches there is in fact only one dreamer, but then talks of
multiple dreamers making decisions to awake. I would like to submit to
you that such talk is essentially incoherent.
Logically you can't "have your cake and eat it too." You can't have
1+1=2 sometimes, and then have 1+1=3 when that suits you somewhere
else.
As the course teaches, "The truth is true, and nothing else is true."
Either 1+1=2 or it doesn't. No other alternative is possible.
I would like to submit to you that the only truth that is true is
always logical, consistent, and makes sense once you know _all_ of the
details. Unfortunately for humanity there is still very much that is
hidden from our view.
As I have written on my weblog there is much that is good in the
teachings of ACIM. The good that it teaches in my view is the idea that
we should do certain things like love, and forgive others. ACIM teaches
the oneness of humanity and in that I must agree. It teaches us that
the world and the events of one life are not as terribly important as
we once believed.
I also think that ACIM may very well have some inspiration greater than
just the intelligence of Helen Schucman. In regards to that there is a
post on my weblog entitled "Helen's Handwriting." I asked a friend of
mine to analyze her handwriting. What he came up with might surprise
you.
Helen's Handwriting
http://www.thenewagesite.com/archives/200609.php#handwriting
Finally it is not my purpose to debunk ACIM as something without value.
The many people I have met who follow the teachings of ACIM to some
degree have impressed me with their sincere efforts to practice what
they preach.
My quest started out as an attempt to come to an objective
understanding of what the Course teaches. In that quest I have studied
the Course over some number of years and I have written to various
lists and newsgroups to elicit responses that might help me in that
quest.
I started out this thread initially because I found that Gary Renard's
book, The Disappearance of the Universe, has been the single greatest
accelerator for me in coming to what I believe is an understanding of
what ACIM teaches.
The end result is that I have decided to leave the Course behind at
this point and go onward in my journey to study other things. I hope to
take what I found to be of value in the Course with me, and I will
leave behind that which I cannot accept now. This idea is expressed
very eloquently in the following quote from Father Thomas Keating:
When Jesus said, "Repent," to his first disciples, he was calling them
to change the direction in which they were looking for happiness.
"Repent" is an invitation to grow up and become a fully mature human
being who integrates the biological needs with the rational level of
consciousness. The rational level of consciousness is the door that
swings into higher states -- the intuitive and unitive levels of
consciousness. They open us to the experience of God's presence, which
restores the sense of happiness. We can then take possession of
everything that was good in our early life while leaving the
distortions behind. Thomas Keating, The Human Condition
What Keating describes as the "door that swings into higher states" and
achieving the "unitive level of consciousness," even if only
fleetingly, comes closer to describing my experience. That experience
has value to me only if it is "real" in some fundamental sense.
Thank you for your words, and if I cannot agree with the exact
substance of your words, I can most certainly agree with what I
perceive is the intent behind them.
very best regards,
Lawrence Kennon
http://www.theNewAgeSite.com
Tom
. . "
~ He does NOT.
Lee Flynn
> a movie projection screen - nothing you think or do is actually
> determined by you. You don't exist and are nothing but one of billions
> of projections created by the one real, and true dreamer.
Hi Lawrence,
Again, thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts with
us. You describe a pretty sorry and meaningless reality as the
Course's essential metaphysical message.;) And I understand
why you are so critical of that message. I am, too.
As you know from reading "Disappearance," there appears to
be a sizeable number of Course students who embrace that
basic interpretation of the Course's message. However, as a
long-time student, I find no support in the Course for that
perspective, whatsoever.
I know that you are generally familiar with the Urtext of ACIM,
but I'm not sure whether you've had the occasion to read the
first portion of it, that roughly correlates to the first 5 of
ACIM's 31 Chapters. Most of the severe editing that preceded
the published Course was done to the first 5 chapters of
scribed material, and the relatively recent availability of the
unedited Urtext provides a reading experience dramatically
incompatible with the interpretation that you describe.
Recently, I created a page of quotes from the Urtext
concerning that aspect of our individuated Identities referred
to as the "Soul." These are *extremely* helpful passages toward
clarifying what the Author would have us know about who and
what we are - here and now - beyond the shallow artifice of ego.
Almost all of the passages that appear have been either omitted,
or editorially altered, in the published Course.
Having gathered every mention of 'Soul' across the Urtext, with
surrounding context, I then highlighted mentions of the words
"ego", "mind" and "man." What emerges is a much different
picture of the abiding holiness of the mind of man, and its
relationship to God and the Soul. Here is a representative quote,
109. Christ inspires all miracles, which are essentially
intercessions. They intercede for man's holiness, and make him
holy. They place man beyond the physical laws, and raise him
into the sphere of celestial order. In this order, man IS
perfect.
This hardly describes non-existence or inconsequential identity. ;)
The page is available here:
http://lucidrealmer.googlepages.com/urtext_soul
Here a few other quotes of interest, in this regard..
639. NOTHING can prevail against a Son of God who commends
his Spirit into the hands of His Father. <[By doing this, the mind
awakens from its sleep, and the Soul remembers its Creator.]>
All sense of Separation disappears, and level confusion
vanishes.
712. God and the Souls He created remain in surety, and
therefore KNOW that no miscreation exists. Truth cannot deal
with unwilling error, because it does not will to be blocked
out. <[But I was a man who remembered the Soul and its
knowledge.]>
3878. ONLY the mind is capable of illumination. The *Soul* is
already illuminated, and the body in itself is too dense. The
mind, however, can BRING its own illumination TO the body ...
[The body is] easily brought into alignment with a mind which
has learned to look beyond density toward light.
3879. Corrective learning always begins with awakening the
spiritual eye, and turning away from belief in physical sight.
There's nothing attractive to me about what Renard and
Dr Wapnick describe as the metaphysics of ACIM. Happily,
I can say that I believe the Urtext helps to clarify that they
are fundamentally mistaken in their understanding.
~ Lee
Sheryl Valentine
always logical, consistent, and makes sense once you know _all_ of the
details. Unfortunately for humanity there is still very much that is
hidden from our view.
sv: yes, I totally agree with you
Lawrence:As I have written on my weblog there is much that is good in the
teachings of ACIM. The good that it teaches in my view is the idea that
we should do certain things like love, and forgive others. ACIM teaches
the oneness of humanity and in that I must agree. It teaches us that
the world and the events of one life are not as terribly important as
we once believed.
sv: to the contrary I think that the Course teaches us that the world and
the events of one life *are* terribly important in the sense that we can
learn to see the world and events of a life with another vision and thus
come to recognize the truth that we (I if you will) am not a victim of the
world that I think I see.
Lawrence;quote from Father Thomas Keating:
When Jesus said, "Repent," to his first disciples, he was calling them
to change the direction in which they were looking for happiness.
"Repent" is an invitation to grow up and become a fully mature human
being who integrates the biological needs with the rational level of
consciousness. The rational level of consciousness is the door that
swings into higher states -- the intuitive and unitive levels of
consciousness. They open us to the experience of God's presence, which
restores the sense of happiness. We can then take possession of
everything that was good in our early life while leaving the
distortions behind. Thomas Keating, The Human Condition
sv: great quote!
Lawrence: Thank you for your words, and if I cannot agree with the exact
substance of your words, I can most certainly agree with what I
perceive is the intent behind them.
sv: thanks, I appreciate that. Sheryl
www.sherylvalentine.blogspot.com
"theNewAgeSite" <thenew...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1158268860.7...@i42g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
Sharon
"Lee Flynn" <lucid...@att.net> wrote in message
news:BbGNg.119944$5i3....@bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net...
> Hey folks,
>
> I've clipped a portion of this writer's comments that poses a *very*
> common criticism of one of ACIM's central tenets -- the assertion
> that God can only have created the perfect and eternal..
>
Only problem that I can see with that argument is that the C says in
several places that God only creates the eternal and the changeless. I
could pull up the quotes, but we know it's there, so why bother? It could
be that in the UR it says that God created time and matter (things that are
not eternal and change) but then we have to deal with a contradiction. I
think that who created what is sort of meaningless in larger scheme of
things. The HS will use the body, the earth, everything to heal our mind.
Where it came from is beyond what I can comprehend, and I can't think of
any reason it would really hinder my purpose of forgiveness, and
remembering my identity as Christ with my brothers.
Let's say the body was made by the split mind; ok, then the HS spirit can
use it to heal the separation. Now let's say the body was made by God, ok,
the HS can use it to heal the separation. It's the purpose you give it
that makes the difference, imo.
> His point is that the Course thus dismisses all of manifest creation
> as "not real," and "only a dream, etc." because nothing of this life
> measures up to ACIM's description of God (and anything He
> created) as only perfect.
>
The Course does not dismiss manifest creation. It does say however that
we see one of two illusionary worlds; "the world" or the happy dream
(which leads to the gate of Heaven which I call the "real world"). It also
states very clearly that all these states are illusionary, and which you
see depends on which perception you are using. Again, this is something
that is there in the C and easily looked up and doesn't need quotes.
What perhaps is being missed here, imo, is that the happy dream, and the
real world are a state of mind so close to Heaven that it is a clear and
perfect reflection of it upon the world. And not only that, but it leads
us to the gateway of Heaven and to remembering our perfection. When
being stuck in a state of hell, that is good news, no? :-)
The Course is a way out of suffering and pain, and a way to complete peace.
there is nothing depressing about that in the least. This is true
whether God made that tree in my backyard or not. The tree is not bring
me peace, God is. And God is in my mind, and everything I see can reflect
that if I choose. halleluiah! :)
> He (and many others ;) believes that Course students are thus
> faced with several contradictions, in regard to the value of this
> material and its message..
>
> 1) If this is all a dream, then what difference does anything
> that happens here make (including ACIM), at all?
>
If this is their conclusion, then they are missing everything in the book
that is written about true perception, forgiveness, the **happy**
(meaningful) dream, resting with God, choosing peace, and being free of all
pain and suffering. All this is "chosen" before entering the gate of
Heaven. Pretty huge stuff to be written off as a "mere dream", imo.
> 2) Course students who claim that ACIM's message is important
> are left to explain what could possibly be important about any
> particular element of a mere dream.
>
It is only depressing and bleak when you are perceiving the world without
His vision or correction.
> 3) Assigning value to ACIM across this mere dream is even
> more senseless, given that it's "not even our dream because
> ultimately none of us exists - we are figments of some cosmic
> imagination."
>
I don't know what you have read, but I can say that we are not a vulnerable
self living in body. We have a false self, and then our self in Christ.
But, this doesn't mean that an aspect of each of us isn't real and part of
the Christhood! Be careful that you don't misunderstand what people have
said about this. We are unaware that our minds our joined and we are much
vaster than we ever imagined. The mind has limited itself by believing it
is a weak body, and that all it is. The power of the mind is lost as long
as we have forgotten that this isn't our true nature.
Personally Lee, I have never read or heard anyone deny (as a Course
student) that we don't exist as Christ or as one unified Mind. But, I
have seen people misunderstood as saying that many times, when I believe
that they meant something along the lines of what I just said above.
> To the writer of this piece (and most ACIM critics I've come
> across), these are the *inevitable* issues that result from the
> Course's description of this life as a dream. Meaninglessness
> reigns across dreams, he reasons. And he traces ACIM's 'need'
> to consign this life to a dreamworld back to ACIM's metaphysical
> insistence that anything short of its unrealistic definition of
> God's perfect/eternal nature MUST be unreal.
>
You have assigned it the word "meaningless" to the happy dream, Lee. The
happy dream is not meaningless because it has His meaning. If becoming
free from a prison of misery and hopelessness is meaningless.. then this is
how you are choosing to view it.
> Thus he considers ACIM's definition of God and Creation
> to be, themselves, unrealistic.
>
> "Perfection of the kind spoken of in ACIM, and Gary's novel
> is just another illusion engendered by taking a concept to an
> unjustified extreme."
>
> His solution for avoiding the kind of metaphysical trap that
> would dismiss this life as meaningless illusion (because it
> doesn't pass the "eternal and perfect" test of a perfect God's
> "real" creation) is to reject any such definitions of God.
>
> He reasons that God may be less than theoretically perfect,
> and in some sense Creating along a learning curve of His own,
> such that we need not reject God's authorship of this life, based
> on its imperfections.
>
> What I'm wondering is two things. Whether any of you have
> responses to the three numbered points that he raises, above.
> And whether any of you can more generally respond to his
> concern that ACIM's definition of God and His creations as
> necessarily both perfect and eternal necessarily dismiss this
> human and worldly life as essentially meaningless illusion,
> or mere dream, etc.
>
> His objections to what he understands of ACIM's metaphysics
> are standard objections among ACIM critics. I think it would
> be useful to hear different takes on how that criticism is
> answered.
>
> What do you think, folks?
>
I sent this post with hesitation, because I know that you and I don't agree
that the real world being an illusion, but yet perfect reflection of
Heaven. I think that a perfect reflection of Heaven is wonderful, and
brings me peace.
I was not going to answer this post because I've been here before, but I
have noticed that every couple months, you post something along these lines
again asking for opinions. I'm not sure what it is you want. If you
believe how you believe, that's cool with me. But, I will offer you my
interpretation again, since you have asked me for it, and I hope it is of
some use to you.
Love to you, my real brother in Christ ... :-)
Sharon
Sharon
"Doug Thompson" <dtho...@hotmail.cam> wrote in message
news:r9udne2T-rO_EZXY...@golden.net...
>
First off, let me start by apologizing for being an ass toward you in the
ng prior to this. (and I don't think "ass" is too strong a word, here) I
know that in truth, I didn't really do anything wrong..and yada yada...but
I want to offer this to you anyway. I would like to start over and not go
into name calling and unproductive methods of communication. :)
I'm going to cut some of your dialog so that it doesn't get too long. If I
clip something important, just bring it to my attention.
> >
> > ~ Then there is the branch of thinking that interprets the Course to
> > say that "physical" is independent of "mental." How this
> > interpretation is reached has yet to be explained. There is not much,
> > if anything, in the Course to support it.
> >
>
> There are two "worlds" ACIM talks about. Neither is synonymous with
"earth"
> except maybe in a very few passages.
>
True, and yet it also tells us that our thoughts have not left our mind.
What we see with our eyes and "think" are both a reflection of an inward
condition. This would be all inclusive, I would think, and nothing would
be excluded from this.
> "The world as ego sees it" is the illusion. That's a world full of sin
and
> guilt and anything unpleasant you care to name or imagine or manifest.
The
> "Real World" is the reality ... but that is said to be an "illusion" too.
I
> don't think EITHER of those "worlds" are different "physical objects" or
> places, but rather they are ways of perceiving everything, physical and
> psychological and experiential. They are "worlds of the mind" and not
> anything physical per se at all.
>
If the physical is really unimportant in the larger scheme of things, and
it's all about the "world of thoughts", why even ponder the value of the
physical at all or attempt to determine who create it?
<snip>
> Now ACIM does say, in the "Urtext" version, that God created space, time
and
> matter as "teaching devices for your mind." There is no question that
these
> things aren't permanent, they are temporary classrooms if you will,
> instruments of learning which are no longer needed when the lessons are
> learned. The body, we know, ain't going to be around for very long in
its
> current form! If we believe in re-incarnation as the Course certainly
> appears to, we know we get a new one as soon as we "need" it for our
> learning. So the "loss of life" isn't such a big deal, it's just the
loss
> of a body, it's inevitable eventually anyway, it doesn't mean the death
of
> myself or the end of life, it is just a transition, compared in ACIM to
> casting off "an outworn garment." To the ego, in whose thought system
the
> Body IS itself (and actually without body there is no ego, the ego is the
> idea that I am a body) the body has to be valuable.
>
This is exactly it. It's not permanent whether God made it or not. The
sun will burn up the earth eventually. It's only value is to let the HS
use it as a vehicle in which to heal the mind of the son. Beauty can also
be reflected upon it. But thoughts never leave their source.
>
> Every religion I know of teaches that physical life on Earth is not our
> "true home", that it is transitory, that there is some kind of "teaching"
or
> "learning" function going on, and that when we leave this world we go to
a
> better place. In that sense, in ALL religions, "the physical is not
real"
> or at least not "ultimate reality" and nobody can argue that bodies are
more
> than temporary vehicles for the mind! We know they don't last very
long!!!
> Only a handful of religions place much emphasis on the "physical" as much
> more than symbolic, transitory and second rate.
>
yes...good point.
> Gary and Ken make the point that their metaphysics is totally different
from
> all other religions, and claim to have derived their metaphysics from the
> Course. With Ken, his metaphysics was there when he picked up the Course
> and he's spent a lifetime trying to dismiss the bulk of the Course as
"myth"
> or "metaphor" because it flatly says his metaphysics is false! The
> difference between "Kenthink" and religion in general though isn't really
in
> the "reality/unreality" element, as I've just shown. The difference is
in
> the meaning that reality/unreality is given.
>
ok... I'll read on to see what you mean.
> ACIM describes a process of mind training and progressive awakening
whereby
> we learn to "see the face of Christ in every living thing" and "forgive"
> ourselves for projecting guilt and sin on "Christ",learning to take
> responsibility for our own experience, and gradually become aware of the
> "Real World" which is characterized as, quite literally, "Heaven on
earth."
> This is a transformation, not just of the individual mind, soul,
> consciousness, but of the whole human race and human society being
> described, and being described as "inevitable" and as possibly "taking
> millions of years." This is the "crusade to save the world" and the
value
> of individual enlightenment as one "Awakens" one unconsciously helps
others
> do so.
>
You state "see the face of Christ in every living thing" in quotes, why?
Is that a quote from somewhere? My understanding is that we see the face
of Christ in our brothers, but not an oak tree. :) Thoughts don't leave
their source, so if we have the vision of the HS, then we see it
everywhere; even in an oak tree. But the oak tree *in and of itself* is
neutral, and isn't literally our brother in Christ, imo. What we "see" is
an outward evidence of an inward condition of our choice between love and
fear.
> This idea, that "The City of God" as Augustine called it or "Heaven on
> Earth" as others have called it is an achievable project in space and
time
> and is God's Will and is the teleological outcome of the space-time
> experience AND is, as ACIM describes it, "The Gate of Heaven" through
which
> we must pass before we get to heaven, is by no means new OR different
than
> core ideas found in many religions. It's the teaching of ACIM and its
180
> degrees off the Wapnick/Renard approach to "the world" which they see as
a
> hopeless write-off.
I love many of your ideas Doug, but I feel this is an exaggeration.
Wapnick has many articles you could find right now that talk extensively
about the happy dream, and the value the HS using the body as a vehicle in
healing our mind. Obviously the body operates on the physical earth.
This is not a write-off of "the world" as you say.
As far a Renard, I don't remember enough of the book to even go there.
<snip>
> The point is made to stress the idea that on earth there is nothing but
> endless repetition of the dance of guilt and death and the only way out
is
> INDIVIDIAL "awakening" to the state of "Ascended Master." The Course
says
> we all go together, "the Ark of Peace is entered two by two." Gary and
Ken
> say we go alone and there is no hope, no evolution and no redemption on
> earth. >
Firstly, Ken does not say we "go alone", Doug. I could pull up many essays
that he has written that talk about the value of your brother, and that he
is your savior. This is what Ken writes, and teaches.
Secondly, *you* are the one now placing the importance on the physical
earth, instead of the "world of thoughts" here. Why would someone place
"hope" on a physical world heading into the sun for extinction down the
road? It not about the vehicle that our salvation lies, but in
recognizing that our true identity as Christ by letting Him use everything
that we hold dear to us. This is done by using the body/earth as a means
to an end. The means are not important in themselves, it's changing the
"world of thoughts" that heals and awakens us to truth.
There is only an opportunity to learn what they call "forgiveness"
> but which, when you look at what they mean by it, you find has nothing to
do
> with what anyone else, including Jesus, would recognize as genuine
> forgiveness! It certainly has nothing to do with forgiving people!
>
Personally, I've never noticed this before.
>
> Nowhere does ACIM contradict or correct Genesis 1:1!! It does say God
> created space and time and matter as teaching devices for our minds which
is
> pretty much what most religions say. Ken, of course, took that part out
to
> make ACIM less obviously completely incompatible with his own neo-Gnostic
> dualism.
Here again, you are making "who created the world" an issue by returning to
time and time again. Otherwise, why would it matter what Ken thinks of
the earth? If it's about a "world of thoughts" then it's about a "world of
thoughts" not a physical world, per se, right?
And when ACIM says "the world you see" (meaning the world you
> conjure in your minds with your distorted physical vision which is not
the
> real world) Ken reads "earth" and in doing that he misreads ACIM.
It appears to me, that this is what you are doing, but in an opposite way.
You see "world" and you dismiss the physical from the equation, saying that
it's unimportant to the "world of thoughts". Whereas, I see Ken lumping
it all together, and seeing no distinction between thoughts and the
physical world. It's all coming from the same source; the mind.
When ACIM
> says "you made the world as an attack on God" meaning that illusion of a
> world you made up, and not the real world at all, Ken reads "earth."
Again,
> misreading ACIM. The misreading of ACIM is made easier by the fact that
he
> took out the definition of "world" which Jesus had given Helen at the
> beginning, which definition would make that error less likely since it
> clearly indicates that "world" isn't being used to refer to the planet or
> anything physical.
>
Here we are again. Let's say the physical earth *was* an attack on God,
would that prevent you from asking the Holy Spirit to use it and your body
as a way to heal your mind? Again, what is it for? And why does this
hinder someone from practicing forgiveness and seeing the happy dream?
<snip>
The Universe, which ACIM very clearly states was created by God
> too, survives our awakening, apparently but we don't need bodies after
the
> awakening is complete.
>
and yet again, it's an issue.
<snip>
>
> Gary didn't need to lie about his book to sell it. He could just be coy
...
> which he was at first actually ... and say it doesn't matter what you
> believe about his alleged visitors. While that is not precisely true in
> that if one does believe they are Apostles then one is likely to believe
> everything they say is right more than if one recognized it's just Gary
and
> Ken talking, it's still a lot more honest that claiming that fiction is
> non-fiction! Well, less DIShonest at any rate.
>
I have no clue, personally. Do consider this to be an opinion, btw?
>
> Jesus has a better answer than "sin is real." It is "what you give is
what
> you get." That's a reason to be nice to others rather than lie to them
> because whatever you give to the "world" that appears to be external is
> being given to yourself and WILL manifest in your experience sooner or
> later. THAT is one of the things TIME was created to TEACH us! :)
Rather
> clearly THAT lesson is one that Ken and Gary are still waiting to learn!
:)
>
No one has said "sin is real" in Renards book or anything I've heard Ken
say. Quite the contrary. Sin and error are different, because "sin" is
eternal to us, whereas error can be corrected. I'm pretty sure that even
Wapnick would be on the same page as me on that. Anyway...
I thought twice about even pointing this out to you, Doug, but it just gets
so outrageous as you go on and on, I decided to jump on the old
bandwagon... just for old times sake. ;)
Anyway... carry on!
Sharon
Sharon
>
> > ~ Kindly account for the following:
> >
> > "The real world is not like this. It has no buildings, and there are
> > no streets where people walk alone and separate. There are no stores
> > where people buy an endless list of things they do not need. It is
> not lit with artificial light, and night comes not upon it. There is
> no day that brightens and grows dim. There is no loss. Nothing is
> there but shines, and shines forever. The world YOU see must be
> DENIED, for sight of it is costing you a different kind of vision."
> >
>
> Doug "I think I said "the worlds" ACIM discusses aren't "anything
> physical per se at all." With a VERY few possible exceptions when the
> "world" may refer to something physical, as in "God so loved the world
> He gave it TO his Son."
>
> ~ You are saying that God loved the physical world? That makes no
> sense at all.
>
> EXACTLY the same thing. It's not talking about physical stuff, either
> man-made (artificial light) or natural (no day and night) but "mental
> stuff" if you will."
>
> ~ How can you say that the above quote is not talking about streets,
> buildings, day, and night, when that is EXACTLY what it is talking
> about?
>
> of guilt and sin. Clearly neither are "physical things" but "mental
> things" or pure idea and interpretation."
>
> ~ I hear on the news there was a school shoot-out up your way. I
> understand that the shooter was shot and killed by the police. Are
> you saying that the police acted improperly?
>
> message to worry about whether that tree over there is "real" or "an
> illusion." The only point at which it matters is that if you start
> thinking the tree is the illusion then you start to think of it as
> evil and then you start to see it as your problem. The tree is not
> your problem, your mind is your problem! And as for the tree, what
> ACIM tells us to do with it is "see the face of Christ" in it!
>
> Doug paragraph (2) The basic Christian idea (not contradicted in ACIM)
> that The "world" (material universe) is "good" because God created it
> is reflected in ACIM many times, "see the face of Christ in every
> living thing" and even "God is in the Wastebasket." Space, time and
> matter were created as "teaching devices for your mind" ... and they
> have a Holy purpose however "illusory" they might be."
>
> ~ Why is it that in your paragraph (2) you immediately proceed to do
> what you described in paragraph (1) as being "a huge diversion"?
>
<snip>
This is a very good observation, imo, about what takes place in many of
Doug's essays. He vacillates from the earth not being important to the
overall message of the Course, to repeatedly writing about it's importance
in the Course's overall message.
Sharon
Deborah2
Sharon wrote:
> You state "see the face of Christ in every living thing" in quotes, why?
> Is that a quote from somewhere? My understanding is that we see the face
> of Christ in our brothers, but not an oak tree. :) Thoughts don't leave
> their source, so if we have the vision of the HS, then we see it
> everywhere; even in an oak tree. But the oak tree *in and of itself* is
> neutral, and isn't literally our brother in Christ, imo. What we "see" is
> an outward evidence of an inward condition of our choice between love and
> fear.
13. Such is your resurrection, for your life is not a part of anything
you see.
It stands beyond the body and the world, past every witness for
unholiness,
within the Holy, holy as Itself. In everyone and everything His Voice
would
speak to you of nothing but your Self and your Creator, Who is One with
Him. So
will you see the holy Face of Christ in everything, and hear in
everything no
sound except the echo of God's Voice.
W(319)
While reading your post which I don't have time to complete right now,
I wanted to copy this passage from the HLC for you.
~Deborah
~Deborah
Sharon
Ah.. thanks Deborah. I couldn't find it in a search because the word
"holy" was gone. But, yeah, it makes sense because you are going to
reflect your Self on the world you see if you are choosing with the
HS. :-)
Sharon
Deborah2
There is a lot about every living thing ....here is a couple more
6. You ARE as God created you, and so is every living thing you look
upon,
regardless of the images you see. HLC T XXXI H 6 (864)
9. There is no living thing which does not share the universal will
that it be
whole, and that you do not leave its call unheard. HLC T XXXI A 9
(838)
It can be kind of creepy, I think. Some things are just creepy.
I will to get over creeped out. :)
~Deborah
Sharon
Thanks for the quotes ~Deborah. It just goes to show that I don't
really know, huh? :-)
I'm listening to Sheryl talk.. I'll be back later.
Love,
Sharon
Sharon
"Sheryl Valentine" <SherylV...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:4mtiejF...@individual.net...
> Sharon:I had a flash, if you will, of His perfect plan, and it become
very
> clear to me that this plan was behind and beyond *everything* I "see"
> with my physical eyes. No matter how terrible the event I "witness",
> it is still there. No exceptions. It's His Answer to everything,
> and it never fails us. It brought me comfort, healing and made what
> would have been a terrible event, a wonder blessing. A true gift.
> I believe it was a glimpse of the real world, and the perfection that
> is laid down right next to it's alternative.
>
> sv: yes, great post. I've had similiar experiences as well. What helps
me
> is to keep in mind that there is a bigger picture, a greater plan, that
we
> just can't see or truly know from this level of existance but as we trust
In
> God's vision we can bring healing to ourselves and this world. Even the
> bible says that "we know in part". I believe that this is a benevolent
> universe and though it appears not to be, as we learn these lessons
within
> it we truly come to know this truth, imo, of course. Sheryl
>
yes, well put. There are things we just can't see or know, but as we go
along in our journey with the Holy Spirit, it becomes easier to trust that
everything is working out perfectly, in accordance to His plan.
Sharon
Sharon
> sharon:I believe that *if* we are looking at the world with His vision,
and
> see the perfect plan beyond everything, we cannot help but live life like
it
> matters to us; because we are living in love, not fear. Love
> matters to us, because we *are* love. And when we remember we are
> love, we extend it.
>
>
> sv: yes, I see it this way as well. sheryl--
Cool... :)
Lee Flynn
> Richard "The illusion is only meaningless if that is its purpose for
> (to) us. Like all things, it has only the meaning we give to it. It
> can serve to reinforce the lessons of the ego or to teach the lessons
> of forgiveness."
>
>
> ~ The only illusion is not seeing what is there . . . not seeing the
> universe of God's creation. To interpret the Course in such a way to
> reinforces the idea that what IS there is NOT there is to reinforces
> insanity.
>
> "To be told that what you do not see is there sounds like insanity.
> It is very difficult to become convinced that it is insanity not to
> see what is there, and to see what is not there instead."
How is "the universe of God's creation" related to the world of one's
common experience, Tom?
Tom
one's common experience, Tom?"
~ Anything you see today that will still be there unchanged 5,000,000
years from now might qualify as being part of God's creation.
~ More directly, it is clear to me at least, the Course speaks of two
totally different types of perception (maybe three). There is the
perception provided by the bodily senses -- sight, sound, touch,
etc., and there is spiritual perception -- the "spiritual eye" that
was so ingloriously deleted by a certain over-confident young man who
incorrectly thought he knew better. These two different forms of
perception show us two entirely different worlds.
~ The bodily sense perceptions dominate our conscious mind, whereas
spiritual perceptions are generally unconscious, complicated by the
fact that our power of spiritual perception is asleep and dreaming.
Third-eye blind, or third-eye hallucinating, more or less..
~ Generally speaking the lesser awakening is to arouse unconscious
spiritual perception from its dreaming slumber, even if it remains
unconscious. The greater awakening is to make the awakened spiritual
perception conscious.
~ This latter seems possible only intermittently in flashes while one
is still identified with a body.
"The world as you perceive it cannot have been created by the Father,
for the world is not as you see it. God created only the eternal, and
everything you see is perishable. Therefore, there must be another
world that you do not see."
Sharon
Yes, very well put, Tom. Thanks :)
Tom
~ You're welcome.
~ There is, however, a problem. With you I can't tell is you are
being agreeable simply because you've decided to act agreeable, or if
you are agreeable because you agree. There's a difference.
Sharon
lol :-) No, trust me on this, if I didn't agree, I would let you
know.... don't you know me better by now? I just spent the day
disagreeing with Lee and Doug on many issues...but anyway...
What you wrote is how I understand it, and not only that but how I've
experienced it. Yesterday, I shared an experience about my father
where I had a "flash" of remembrance of what I believe was the "real
world" where everything was perfectly planned, healed, and a place of
comfort and peace, and it was of a "spiritual" not physical nature.
Everything physical stayed the same, but it was like I saw another
world with Vision. "Spiritual eye" works well for describing this as
well. Anyway, it fit what you shared.
Sharon
Tom
~ That's great. I guess that having you agree with me is something I
need to digest. I'm living in the past, it seems.
Nancy
Tom wrote:
> Lee "How is "the universe of God's creation" related to the world of
> one's common experience, Tom?"
>
>
> ~ Anything you see today that will still be there unchanged 5,000,000
> years from now might qualify as being part of God's creation.
Everything changes instant to instant.
As I type this, skin cells leave my fingers,
nes cells are created. It seems to me that
the only thing that does not change -- in
the physical world -- is the fact that it con-
stantly changes.
> ~ More directly, it is clear to me at least, the Course speaks of two
> totally different types of perception (maybe three). There is the
> perception provided by the bodily senses -- sight, sound, touch,
> etc., and there is spiritual perception -- the "spiritual eye" that
> was so ingloriously deleted by a certain over-confident young man who
> incorrectly thought he knew better. These two different forms of
> perception show us two entirely different worlds.
Would they be ENTIRELY different, or
would there be an overlap?
> ~ The bodily sense perceptions dominate our conscious mind, whereas
> spiritual perceptions are generally unconscious, complicated by the
> fact that our power of spiritual perception is asleep and dreaming.
> Third-eye blind, or third-eye hallucinating, more or less..
>
> ~ Generally speaking the lesser awakening is to arouse unconscious
> spiritual perception from its dreaming slumber, even if it remains
> unconscious. The greater awakening is to make the awakened spiritual
> perception conscious.
Okay. Yes. This makes sense.
> ~ This latter seems possible only intermittently in flashes while one
> is still identified with a body.
Yes. I see that.
> "The world as you perceive it cannot have been created by the Father,
> for the world is not as you see it. God created only the eternal, and
> everything you see is perishable. Therefore, there must be another
> world that you do not see."
Thanks, Tom.
n.
Doug Thompson
news:LuidnRa6zKXImJfY...@comcast.com...
> This is a very good observation, imo, about what takes place in many of
> Doug's essays. He vacillates from the earth not being important to the
> overall message of the Course, to repeatedly writing about it's importance
> in the Course's overall message.
>
> Sharon
It's not vacillation Sharon ... it's the difficulty of explaining to an
exceedingly hostile audience a fairly subtle idea ... it's "important" to
understand the Course correctly, the Course doesn't put much "importance" on
the physical, so it is an "important error" to misread "the illusion" as
being the earth itself. Making the "unimportant" seem "important" at the
expense of the "genuinely important", which is what Ken and Gary do, is
"important" to understanding the Course and saving the world!
"The Physical Stuff" AS EGO PERCEIVES IT is an illusion. That's because Ego
doesn't perceive it, or anything correctly. Ego perceives "the physical" as
solid, material, EXTERNAL stuff. It isn't that at all. Physics knows it
isn't that and has known that for at least a century but popular culture
hasn't kept up. Time isn't linear and doesn't move at a steady constant
speed, matter isn't solid, and you aren't separate from anything except in
your own perceptions.
So "the world as ego perceives it" is an illusion, both in the Course and in
Physics. That's because the "physical stuff" is neither "solid" nor
"external" except as our highly limited and limiting sense organs perceive
it. For example, our eyes see skin as "solid" and "opaque" yet to X-Rays
skin is transparent. The fact that our eyes "sense" only a very narrow
spectrum of electromagnetic radiation gives rise to the IDEA of what is
solid and what isn't. If we had X-Ray vision we'd "see" a very different
world. That is it would SEEM different, but it would be the same actual
"physical stuff." The "illusion" isn't in what we're looking at but rather
in what we're looking at it with and the entirely undeserved faith we put in
our highly fallible senses.
ALL PERCEPTIONS are illusions even when they are pretty accurate.
Perceptual Psychology has known this at least since the middle of the 20th
Century and much of what is written in ACIM about perception wouldn't be out
of place in a Perceptual Psychology textbook from 1965 (when Helen was
scribing).
Our brains construct a "map of the world" based on data our senses gather
and comparisons of that data with memories. Our brains then interpret the
data and tell us what we are looking at. That's elementary perceptual
psychology. You don't look at a cup. Your eyes gather light and your brain
interprets the signal and tells you that it is a cup. What you THINK of as
"the cup" then is actually only a "map" or "model" of the cup in your brain,
and however good that model, it's not the cup, it's not completely accurate,
and it is not "real" and it is therefore "an illusion." This doesn't make
the CUP into an illusion! The cup is real enough it is just that with your
sense organs alone you CAN NEVER really "know" the cup, you can only form a
"mental map" of some of its attributes with a variable degree of
reliability.
In Lesson 7 we read:
"2. Old ideas about time are very difficult to change, because everything
you
believe is rooted in time, and depends on your not learning these new ideas
about it. Yet that is precisely why you need new ideas about time. This
first
time idea is not really so strange as it may sound at first. Look at a cup,
for
example.
3. Do you see a cup, or are you merely reviewing your past experiences of
picking up a cup, being thirsty, drinking from a cup, feeling the rim of a
cup
against your lips, having breakfast, and so on? Are not your aesthetic
reactions to the cup, too, based on past experiences? How else would you
know
whether or not this kind of cup will break if you drop it? What do you know
about this cup except what you learned in the past? You would have no idea w
hat
this cup is except for your past learning. Do you, then, really see it?"
That's a good scientific description of perception which would have been
completely familiar to Helen and Bill. Of course Perceptual Psychology and
ACIM teach that "you don't really see it." Your "idea" of it is an illusion
with some correspondence to truth. In Gary and Ken's teaching however,
there is nothing wrong with your perception, the problem is that the cup
isn't actually there. This is a complete misreading of ACIM in my view.
What our brains report from processing the sense data is generally useful
most of the time for the purposes of physical survival and navigation, but
is always AT BEST a good guess about a subset of "reality" and at worst is
completely misleading. It's never "totally accurate" and therefore is
always to some extent an "illusion".
Ok ... that's the starting point. What then is "the world?" If we are
talking about the world as we perceive it and normally think about it, then
it is a total illusion because our perceptions are fragmentary and highly
inaccurate for the most part. What Perceptual Psychology also teaches us is
that our trust in our perceptions bears no relation at all to their
reliability. We think (and this is unconscious as well as conscious)
without giving it a second thought that WHAT WE SEE (our limited and
frequently false perceptions) IS WHAT IS REALLY THERE and then we generally
behave accordingly. We are not likely to subject our "belief" about what
we've perceived to a review or reconsideration unless there is dramatic and
overwhelming information that we were mistaken.
So we look on something, our brains deliver an interpretation, and we
believe and behave as if that interpretation is TRUE and REAL and it never
is. At best it is close enough to the truth to allow us to avoid falling in
a hole.
However, none of that means that there isn't anything actually THERE to be
perceived! There IS something there, there is "everything" and God created
it and with the help of the Holy Spirit the Course assures us it can be
perceived. What God did not create is our illusions. Neither the cup nor
planet earth are illusions. Almost everything we think about either, or
think we know about either, save what we think with God IS illusory however.
We live in a world of illusions, which doesn't mean the world is an
illusion, it means we don't see the real world, we see but an illusion of a
world we made up and mistook for the actual world.
Now there are some who read ACIM, ignore (or in Ken's case, delete) the
material about God having created space, time and matter as teaching devices
for our minds, and deduce that the trees and flowers and mountains and lakes
are themselves REALLY the illusions. The "cause" of delusion then isn't in
my mind or brain where I am inevitably misperceiving as both Psychology and
ACIM as I read it teach, the "cause" of delusion is "out there" in the
actual physical stuff which is ITSELF an illusion that I made.
So I am now responsible not for my mistaken IDEAS about the mountain based
in faulty perception, I am responsible for the mountain and if I am to
believe Wapnick and Renard, I put the mountain there to attack God.
Renard then has to make the Ego into an eternal critter responsible for
creating the entire universe 15 billion years ago and has to make "you" and
"me" disappear from being eternal Sons of God, Souls whom God created be
co-creators with him, and Sons to him, to love each and share and join with
each other and Himself in joy and reappear in puddle of cosmic goo into
which we all melt and lose all trace of "self" as we dissolve into God.
Nothing in ACIM says anything about that, but Gary and Ken say a lot about
it and from the notion that we made the roses as an attack on God, this is a
necessary logical inference. The Course however says that the Ego does not
arise before the birth of the body and does not survive the death of the
body. It's one of many points at which what the Course says flatly
contradicts what Gary and Ken teach.
In this view, "world as illusion" becomes an unclimbable mountain. Who can,
by thinking about it, make the mountain go away? This universe was made 15
billion years ago by the Ego, according to Gary, an Ego which fragmented
into a zillion shards, of which we are just one spec, and nothing we can do
about it is going to change that one iota. All we can do is to personally
escape back into the puddle of undifferentiated goo from which he claims we
came.
In ACIM however, we learn that there is nothing wrong with the mountain,
where there is something wrong is with our perceptions, which show to us not
a REAL mountain, but an illusion of a mountain. With the Holy Spirit's help
we can learn to perceive correctly and then we see a "real world" and a
"forgiven world" full of "happy dreams" in which there is ought but Joy.
Having reached that stage, God then takes the next step and translates earth
into heaven. That's what the Course says. That part is totally ignored by
Ken and Gary.
So teaching that the earth is an illusion is "important" because it
sidesteps the Course's actual message and places the illusion "outside" our
minds where we have no influence upon it. Such teaching puts the emphasis
on the material stuff and turns IT into the problem. That is an important
error since the Course is very clear that "the problem" isn't 'out there'
but is rather 'in here.'
The actual physical materiality is "not important" in that the Course isn't
talking much about molecules but is talking about our responsibility for our
experience and how to change our perceptions, through forgiveness, to bring
about the happy dream and learn to experience the real world of joy.
The material stuff isn't important but the "the world is an illusion" school
of thought MAKES it important and in doing so distracts our attention from
what REALLY is important.
That's how come the material is both unimportant and important :). Because
it is not important we shouldn't worry too much about it, but it is
important if we focus on mistaken ideas about physicality to the exclusion
of what really is important! Thus it is important to tell you that it is
not important! :)
That's not vacillation or lack of precise clarity in my thought as to what
is at issue here! :):)
From the HLC T II C 5 (31-32)
"5. The body, if properly understood, shares the invulnerability of the
Atonement to two-edged application. This is not because the body is a
miracle,
T(32)
but because it is not INHERENTLY open to misinterpretation. The body is
merely
a fact in human experience. Its abilities can be, and frequently are,
overevaluated. However, it is almost impossible to deny its existence. Those
who do so are engaging in a particularly unworthy form of denial. The term
"unworthy" here implies simply that it is not necessary to protect the mind
by
denying the unmindful. There is little doubt that the mind can miscreate.
[T10]
If one denies this unfortunate aspect of the mind's power, one is also
denying
the power itself."
What is said here about the body can, I think, be extended to anything
"material." Denying the "existence" of the body or anything else material
is an "unworthy form of denial" and basically, that unworthy form of denial
is the bedrock of what Ken and Gary teach!
Many times the Course stresses the notion that the "material stuff" does not
have "mindfulness" or "creative ability." The notion that matter was
conjured up 15 billion years ago to have power over us, and that the "world
of matter" is "the problem" completely flies in the face of a central
teaching of ACIM.
"2. A major step in the Atonement plan is to undo error at ALL levels.
Illness,
which is really "not-right-mindedness," is the result of level confusion in
the
sense that it always entails the belief that what is amiss in one level can
adversely affect another. We have constantly referred to miracles as the
means
of correcting level confusion, and all mistakes must be corrected at the
level
at [T9] which they occur. Only the MIND is capable of error. The body can
ACT
erroneously, but this is only because it is responding to mis-thought. The
body
cannot create, and the belief that it CAN, a fundamental error, produces all
physical symptoms.
"3. All physical illness represents a belief in magic. The whole distortion
which created magic rests on the belief that there is a creative ability in
matter which the mind cannot control. This error can take two forms; it can
be
believed that the mind can miscreate IN the body, or that the body can
miscreate
in the mind. If it is understood that the mind, which is the ONLY level of
creation, cannot create beyond itself, neither type of confusion need
occur."
- HLC T II C 2-3 (31)
The "physical" is not only NOT the problem, it is presented as THE SOLUTION!
The last sentence here stresses that point:
4. Child of God, you were created to create the good, the beautiful, and the
holy. Do not lose sight of this. The love of God, for a little while, must
still be expressed through one body to another because the real vision is
T(19)
still so dim. Everyone can use his body best by enlarging man's perception
so
he can see the REAL vision. THIS vision is invisible to the physical eye.
The
ultimate purpose of the body is to render itself unnecessary. Learning to do
this is the only real reason for its creation. - HLC T 1 C 4 (18)
The material stuff "was created" (by God presumably) as teaching devices so
that we can "learn" *something*. That "something" here could be "learning
to render itself [the body] unnecessary" or "creat[ing] the good, the
beautiful and the holy" or "enlarging man's perception so he can see the
REAL vision" or, possibly, all of the above since they are all aspects of
one and the same notion of transcendence.
Our illusions about the body are problematic, but the body and other
material things are "neutral." Time is said to be neutral, bodies are said
to be neutral, matter is said to be neutral. What is NOT neutral is the
mistaken (illusory) ideas and beliefs we develop ABOUT them. The "matter"
isn't the problem, it's just a neutral teaching device, our "minds" and what
we believe about matter is the problem the Course addresses.
Making the "stuff" into the illusion imbues it with a power beyond our will
and our responsibility and flatly states that it is NOT neutral but is, in
fact, "the problem."
It's not an "illusion" though most all of our ideas about it are. It is a
"fact of human experience", it's "neutral," and its PURPOSE is that of a
teaching device. It's not only not the problem, it's the means to the
solution as we learn to perceive it correctly!
So in that sense, I suppose the "physical" is important. But really that is
just saying that our perceptions of the physical are important! And that's
just saying that it is important to know what it true and what is false.
All the best,
Doug
Tom
explaining to an exceedingly hostile audience a fairly subtle idea
..."
~ There isn't anything particularly subtle about your idea, Doug, any
more that Wapnick's metaphysics is complex. You confuse not agreeing
with your idea as not understanding it, which is not the case.
~ I understand what you are saying. I just don't agree with it, and I
do not think that you are describing what the Course is saying.
~ More words are not going to change the situation much.
(My spell check still wants to change Wapnick to Warlock)
Sharon
Yeah.. I know what you mean, it does seem unusual. :) But, I don't
believe that I have changed my interpretations of the Course, what you
described is how I have understood the Course for years.
Furthermore, this may be shocking, but I don't see a huge difference
between what Carmen expressed in her "simple themes", and how I
understand Ken's teachings. I think there is a difference, maybe, on
the emphasis of what is most important. For example; Ken is more into
teaching that the world "unfixable" and giving up all hope of changing
it ~ but he adds that you *can* change your mind about it, and *this*
in turn changes the world you see. Which stays in line with what
thoughts not leaving their source, and our choice for a different
perception, and seeing the happy dream instead.
I support learning that the world can not be changed first, simply
because we need to align our will with God's and as long as we think
we are in charge, we will not surrender to another way of seeing the
world.
If there is a difference in how you understand this, tell me, cause I
must be missing something!
(I know terms like "spiritual eye" is something Ken doesn't use for
example, but I believe that Vision is the same thing. Vision is a
spiritual "seeing". So, sometimes a word is different, but I still
think the overall message is the same.)
Now, I could be completely off here because I don't know your
understanding of the C in depth, and if I am, I would be interested in
how you see it differently.
Cheers :-)
Sharon
Sharon
"Doug Thompson" <dtho...@hotmail.cam> wrote in message
> "Sharon" <blue...@comcast.net> wrote in message
> news:LuidnRa6zKXImJfY...@comcast.com...
>> This is a very good observation, imo, about what takes place in
>> many of
>> Doug's essays. He vacillates from the earth not being important to
>> the
>> overall message of the Course, to repeatedly writing about it's
>> importance
>> in the Course's overall message.
>>
>> Sharon
>
>
> It's not vacillation Sharon ... it's the difficulty of explaining to
> an
> exceedingly hostile audience a fairly subtle idea ... it's
> "important" to
> understand the Course correctly, the Course doesn't put much
> "importance" on
> the physical, so it is an "important error" to misread "the
> illusion" as
> being the earth itself. Making the "unimportant" seem "important"
> at the
> expense of the "genuinely important", which is what Ken and Gary do,
> is
> "important" to understanding the Course and saving the world!
>
It seems, and this is just my opinion, that it is YOU who puts the
importance on time, matter, and the earth being created by God. There
is no hostile audience here, that I am aware of, just mainly you
bringing up this same topic every couple of months. Like I said, I
really don't think it matters who created the earth, because it can be
used by the Holy Spirit either way. I see no real value in trying to
figure something out that beyond my present understanding. And if
something is not eternal, in which we agree that the earth is not,
what difference does it really make how it got here? It's a vehicle
for the ego or the HS.
Imo, you start with the premise:
1) the earth is not mentioned in the Course, so we really don't know
who created it, because the C is only speaking of a "world of
thoughts" when it says "we made the world we see". Since the C
doesn't speak much about it, it is an unimportant issue. Our "world
of thoughts" is the important issue.
2) You then use this as a springboard to explain all the reasons that
God created the earth, and the fact that the earth is not mentioned
often, gives your argument validity.
So, imo, it is an important concept to you, and what is odd is that
if it really were *all* about a "world of thoughts" and not the
physical, I can see no reason why it would matter to you either way.
It would be a moot point.
<snip>
> However, none of that means that there isn't anything actually
THERE to be
> perceived! There IS something there, there is "everything" and God
> created
> it and with the help of the Holy Spirit the Course assures us it can
> be
> perceived. What God did not create is our illusions. Neither the
> cup nor
> planet earth are illusions. Almost everything we think about
> either, or
> think we know about either, save what we think with God IS illusory
> however.
> We live in a world of illusions, which doesn't mean the world is an
> illusion, it means we don't see the real world, we see but an
> illusion of a
> world we made up and mistook for the actual world.
>
In other words: God created the earth, just not our illusions *about*
it?
> Now there are some who read ACIM, ignore (or in Ken's case, delete)
> the
> material about God having created space, time and matter as teaching
> devices
> for our minds, and deduce that the trees and flowers and mountains
> and lakes
> are themselves REALLY the illusions. The "cause" of delusion then
> isn't in
> my mind or brain where I am inevitably misperceiving as both
> Psychology and
> ACIM as I read it teach, the "cause" of delusion is "out there" in
> the
> actual physical stuff which is ITSELF an illusion that I made.
>
> So I am now responsible not for my mistaken IDEAS about the mountain
> based
> in faulty perception, I am responsible for the mountain and if I am
> to
> believe Wapnick and Renard, I put the mountain there to attack God.
>
Even if we did put the physical "there" to distract us from our
spiritual vision (or truth), would that somehow impair you from
practicing forgiveness, and letting the Holy Spirit reinterpret
everything you see? One thing you never mention, is why if the
purpose of the Course is to change our thoughts, why it matters where
the physical originated. I still have not read anything that really
explains this yet.
> Renard then has to make the Ego into an eternal critter responsible
> for
> creating the entire universe 15 billion years ago and has to make
> "you" and
> "me" disappear from being eternal Sons of God, Souls whom God
> created be
> co-creators with him, and Sons to him, to love each and share and
> join with
> each other and Himself in joy and reappear in puddle of cosmic goo
> into
> which we all melt and lose all trace of "self" as we dissolve into
> God.
>
I think I would remember if Renard tried to make the ego into an
"eternal critter" because that is *so* out there, and yes, we need to
"die" (in a sense) to our false self. There is one Self, and it is
our perfectly united mind, not goo. I thought Reynard's book was
so-so, not outstanding, but I don't think you are accurately
interpreting what he said.
For starters, if Gary didn't actually say "reappear in puddle of
cosmic goo", do you think this is accurate to say that he teaches
exactly this? It your words, taken from your interpretation of what
you read, and you do this sort of stuff consistently with both Gary
and Ken.
> Nothing in ACIM says anything about that, but Gary and Ken say a lot
> about
> it and from the notion that we made the roses as an attack on God,
> this is a
> necessary logical inference. The Course however says that the Ego
> does not
> arise before the birth of the body and does not survive the death of
> the
> body. It's one of many points at which what the Course says flatly
> contradicts what Gary and Ken teach.
>
I can't imagine that Ken would think that the "death" of the body
would heal the mind of the ego.. but I'll check into that. When I
find something on it, I'll post it later.
> In this view, "world as illusion" becomes an unclimbable mountain.
> Who can,
> by thinking about it, make the mountain go away? This universe was
> made 15
> billion years ago by the Ego, according to Gary, an Ego which
> fragmented
> into a zillion shards, of which we are just one spec, and nothing we
> can do
> about it is going to change that one iota. All we can do is to
> personally
> escape back into the puddle of undifferentiated goo from which he
> claims we
> came.
>
It's not about "making a mountain go away" nor is any of the people
you mentioned concerned with such that I have ever read or noticed.
Like you said yourself Doug, it's about changing our thoughts, and the
physical is a vehicle. When the vehicle is no longer needed, what's
it's purpose do you suppose?
It's you, Doug, that is concerned about the mountain being real and
made by God, imo.
Viewing everything as coming from the mind (whether it be thoughts or
physical) means that you don't think anything is "out there" but are
seeing a outward reflection of an inward condition, with no
exceptions. And so, there is no distinction between a thought and
what is physical, because it's all coming from the same source. By
making the physical "real" and the thoughts "unreal" it is you that is
putting the physical "outside" of the mind. If the physical *were*
unrelated to our mind and "outside" of us, then we really wouldn't
have any influence on it, would we?
> The actual physical materiality is "not important" in that the
> Course isn't
> talking much about molecules but is talking about our responsibility
> for our
> experience and how to change our perceptions, through forgiveness,
> to bring
> about the happy dream and learn to experience the real world of joy.
>
Exactly! :-)
> The material stuff isn't important but the "the world is an
> illusion" school
> of thought MAKES it important and in doing so distracts our
> attention from
> what REALLY is important.
>
So, now you are saying it *is* important then? See what I mean,
Doug? To me, what this is really about is you getting your idea
accoss that God made the world, and it's *is* very important to
understand this correctly, if one is going to really "get" the
Course's messages.
> That's how come the material is both unimportant and important :).
> Because
> it is not important we shouldn't worry too much about it, but it is
> important if we focus on mistaken ideas about physicality to the
> exclusion
> of what really is important! Thus it is important to tell you that
> it is
> not important! :)
>
In other words, it's not important if you understand it "correctly",
but if you understand the physical the way Ken does, then it's
important because then you don't get the Course's message? This makes
no sense, because Ken also teaches that we need to change our
thoughts/perceptions about the world we see.
<snip>
> What is said here about the body can, I think, be extended to
> anything
> "material." Denying the "existence" of the body or anything else
> material
> is an "unworthy form of denial" and basically, that unworthy form of
> denial
> is the bedrock of what Ken and Gary teach!
>
Why bring Ken and Gary into everything you say, Doug? Why not just
speak from you own experience? Anyway, just because denying that you
have a body is an "unworthy form of denial" doesn't tell us who made
the body, or where it originated. Yes, we have a physical body in
time, and the HS will use it if we allow Him to do so. Isn't that
the important issue at hand?
<snip>
> The "physical" is not only NOT the problem, it is presented as THE
> SOLUTION!
Now, the physical is the solution? Sounds like a key component of
the Course, in your opinion.
<snip>
> The material stuff "was created" (by God presumably) as teaching
devices so
> that we can "learn" *something*. That "something" here could be
> "learning
> to render itself [the body] unnecessary" or "creat[ing] the good,
> the
> beautiful and the holy" or "enlarging man's perception so he can see
> the
> REAL vision" or, possibly, all of the above since they are all
> aspects of
> one and the same notion of transcendence.
>
Yes, they are temporary teaching devices.
> Our illusions about the body are problematic, but the body and other
> material things are "neutral." Time is said to be neutral, bodies
> are said
> to be neutral, matter is said to be neutral. What is NOT neutral is
> the
> mistaken (illusory) ideas and beliefs we develop ABOUT them. The
> "matter"
> isn't the problem, it's just a neutral teaching device, our "minds"
> and what
> we believe about matter is the problem the Course addresses.
>
I agree, the physical is neutral, only our thoughts about what we
"see" is what needs to be changed.
> Making the "stuff" into the illusion imbues it with a power beyond
> our will
> and our responsibility and flatly states that it is NOT neutral but
> is, in
> fact, "the problem."
>
Saying the God made the physical, and so therefore it must be outside
of the mind that is projection the "world" would make it not neutral,
but something unchangable because changing the mind would have no
effect on what is outside of itself. How would physical miracles be
possible then, for example?
> It's not an "illusion" though most all of our ideas about it are.
So, the physical world is outside the realm of the illusion, then?
It is a
> "fact of human experience", it's "neutral," and its PURPOSE is that
> of a
> teaching device. It's not only not the problem, it's the means to
> the
> solution as we learn to perceive it correctly!
>
> So in that sense, I suppose the "physical" is important. But really
> that is
> just saying that our perceptions of the physical are important! And
> that's
> just saying that it is important to know what it true and what is
> false.
>
That's not what I just heard you saying a few paragraph's before,
Doug.
Sharon
Pieter
- Could you make a resumé of what you assert here?
Just the essentials, without the explanations which
can be found in this pristine post.
Would be great!
I don't have the time to make
a consistent resumé you will agree with.