a course in miracles complete & annotated (ce) edition...
TRANSCRIPT
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A Course in Miracles
Complete & Annotated (CE) Edition Study Guide
Week Five
CourseCompanions.com
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Reading Schedule
Day 29: Review the second half of Chapter 1 (miracle principles 42-50) Chapter 2. Right Defense and Release from Fear
Day 30: I. The Real Meaning of Possession (paragraphs 1-15)
Day 31: I. The Real Meaning of Possession (paragraphs 16-26)
Day 32: II. The Cause of the Separation
Day 33: III. The Proper Use of Denial
Day 34: IV. The Reinterpretation of Defenses
Day 35: V. The Atonement as Defense
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This week we are focusing on:
- Spiritual vision vs. physical sight.
- Responding to the pull of God.
- The proper use of denial.
- “Projecting” right-mindedness.
- Atonement as a defense.
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Day 29: Review: Chapter 1, second half (miracle principles 42-50)
Today we are wrapping Chapter 1 with a review of Miracle Principles 42 through 50.
The Miracle Principles aren’t always a favorite of Course students but hopefully you’re
coming out of this month with a renewed appreciation – and perhaps even an affection
– for them.
Overview: Because we tend to view the world through the lens of separation – i.e. I’m
“me” and you’re “you” – we tend to relate to ourselves and each other as bodies alone.
Naturally this keeps us stuck in the ego because it means we are constantly measuring
other people based on how well they meet our body’s needs. In contrast, the Course is
asking us to expand our perspective beyond the body and make the mind our primary
focus.
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You know how a nurse is in relation to your health? When she is with you, she is
focused on something that most other people aren’t concerned with. That’s analogous
to our role as a miracle worker, in which our full attention is on the welfare of those all-
important minds around us. So, rather than seeing their bodies as a means to our ends,
we see their minds as ends in themselves. By taking the Golden Rule as our guide, we
treat each mind with the same care, regard, and seriousness that we want to be treated
with. Our behavior is meant to channel love to them in just the way they need it, for love
is the medicine here.
- Robert Perry
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Question: The Course says our “spiritual eye” is what enables us to see past
differences in personality, temperament, or any other version of form to our universal
connection. How well do you “look” with spiritual vision versus physical sight?
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Exercise: As you reflect on Chapter one, what were your key takeaways? Here’s a
short list to get your started but please add your own in the space provided
below.
Internal versus external miracles.
How much Jesus really wants to be involved in our decision-making.
The idea that miracles aren’t our highest impulse but our lowest, in the sense of coming
from the lowest level of our unconscious.
Sexual impulse as a distortion of the miracle impulse.
Listen, learn, do.
The spiritual eye identifying errors as unreal.
Will do vs. will to do.
The collapsing of time.
The section on lack under Principle 48.
The validity test.
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Notes and Quotes:
“Child of God, you were created to create the good, the beautiful, and the holy.
Do not lose sight of this.” (T-1.46.7:1)
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Chapter 2
Day 30: Section I - The Real Meaning of Possession (paragraphs 1-15)
Overview: We feel an “irresistible attraction of God” (T-2.I.1:2) that we routinely
push away because it is frightening to our ego’s desire for control. Thus, to ease
our fear of being “possessed” by God we seek to possess things in the world.
In this section, we learn that our inherent pull to be with God is so overpowering that,
while we can deny and delay it, we cannot erase it entirely. This pull is really a desire to
be ‘possessed’ by God, albeit in a healthy sense of completely belonging to Him. Similar
to the sexual impulse, however, because we can’t avoid the “God impulse”, it tends to
get distorted in unhealthy ways that the Course calls “substitute goals” (T-2.I.5:3) we
pursue instead. These include:
1. Type 1: The desire to possess other bodies, as in our romantic partners, etc.
2. Type 2: The desire to possess things (materialism) that keep us enamored and
distracted.
3. Type 3: The desire to be possessed (in a possessive way) by the Holy Spirit, which
the Course says “accounts both for the religious zeal of its proponents and the aversion
(or fear) of its opponents.” (T-2.I.10:3)
4. Type 4: The desire to possess knowledge as a means of making ourselves worthy.
And yet, despite all our efforts to diffuse it, the pull of God remains. In response,
oftentimes we try to diffuse God Himself.
“As I look around at our culture, the idea of this pull is almost absent. Everyone outside
the church is in avoidance of God. There are the atheists who say there is no God.
Then there are the spiritual folks who want to water down God—God as impersonal, as
consciousness, as the void, as energy, as the law of attraction, etc. It’s as if we are all
doing our best to get away from God as traditionally understood. And then we have the
people in the church (well, the conservative church; the liberal end seems to also be in
avoidance of God), and they are praising and worshipping a “merciful” God who is also
a bit of a despot. It’s hard to avoid the impression that they are trying to placate a
terrifying God. A case, you could say, of the lady doth praise too much.”
- Robert Perry
How would you describe your own pull of God? Do you avoid this pull through
any of the familiar desires listed above? Furthermore, do you find yourself
“watering down” God to make Him more manageable or less fearful?
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Notes and Quotes:
“Fear of possession is a perverted expression of the fear of the irresistible
attraction of God.” (T-2.I.1:2)
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Day 31: Section I - The Real Meaning of Possession (paragraphs 16-26)
Overview: This section discusses the shadow side of the “possession fallacy” (T-
2.I.24:1) outlined in yesterday’s reading, noting that miracles “can heal any of them with
equal ease.” (T-2.I.21:1)
Today’s reading is full of the maladaptive effects of what it calls our “conflicted drive” (T-
2.I.18:2), meaning both our pull towards God and our fear of it. A sampling of the effects
mentioned in this section include denial, depression, addictions, paranoia, attack,
psychosis, etc.
Indeed, the fear of our own attraction to God must be truly strong to have us running
this hard to get away. Why else would we prefer to place our mind “under tyranny” (T-
2.I.24:4) – i.e. under the ego – rather than give ourselves freely to God’s love?
Notes and Quotes:
“Peace is an attribute in you. You cannot find it outside.” (T-2.I.26:3-4)
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Day 32: II. The Cause of the Separation
The commentary for today is from Robert Perry.
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This section is the big rollout of the Course’s view of the fall, which it calls, of course,
the separation. (Jesus has already said that that’s the better term—T-1.48.20:3). What I
realize now as I read it is that from start to finish this section is consciously reframing
the story of the fall from Genesis (and especially the Christian interpretation of it).
Course students have given (in my view) a disproportionate amount of attention to the
separation, so in many respects this section’s main themes are old hat for us. We know
the gist of the Course’s view of the separation.
However, what we can glean from this section is just how much Jesus is trying to
correct the traditional view, which, like so many things from the Bible, is a basic part of
our cultural inheritance.
In the traditional view, God creates Adam and places him in this pristine garden, in
which he has no needs. But then Adam and Eve disobey God. They eat of the fruit of
the tree of knowledge of good and evil, hoping that they will become gods. They thus
fall from grace. They are expelled from the garden, they enter a state of lack in which
they must toil to supply their needs, and, most importantly, they acquire a fallen nature,
which they bequeath to all of their descendants. Hence, all of us inherit from them the
stain of original sin. Their relationship with God is ruptured. Thus begins the drama of
the Bible, which is filled with great tension between God and mankind, filled with both
God’s compassion and His wrath, as the two parties contend across the divide created
by Adam (interestingly, the word “Israel” means “contends with God”).
It’s impossible to calculate the psychological legacy of this story. But whatever that
legacy is, we all carry it within us. On some level, we all have taken in by osmosis the
feeling that we are members of a fallen race, bearing the stain of original sin. Deep
inside, we take it for granted that God is on the other side of a great chasm, often
frowning on us across the miles.
Jesus wants to correct this, by supplying us with an alternate picture and by
reinterpreting the story from Genesis. He provides a new term; now it’s the separation,
rather than the fall. In his new picture, God created us already perfect, a condition we
can never lose, no matter what we do. Further, He gave us the power to create like him,
and no matter how powerless we seem on this earth, this is a power we also can never
lose. And He placed us in a spiritual condition, “a mental state of complete need-lack”
(T-2.II.4:2). This is the true meaning of the Garden of Eden in the Bible.
Yes, we did go against Him, even in this new story. We tried to usurp His power
(symbolized by eating the apple). Specifically, we tried to take the power He holds over
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our creation and our nature. We tried to change our nature and even to create
ourselves, even though this meant, since we were already perfect, that we could only go
down from there.
Jesus’ big correction, of course, is that all of this is impossible. We simply have no
power over our creation and our nature. They remain eternal facts, as little under our
personal control as the stars of a distant galaxy.
And so we haven’t really changed at all.
It’s as if we have just fallen under a magic spell and forgotten who we are and
who we really love (paragraph 1).
It’s as if, like Adam, we have simply fallen asleep and are dreaming of usurping
God’s power (paragraphs 14 and 17).
Therefore, none of it happened.
“Your own errors never really occurred” (T-2.II.16:4). We are still Adam in his original
pristine state in the Garden. We just need to be restored to how we were “wont to be”—
meaning how we were accustomed to being.
Try to imagine what our world would be like if this new story was its foundation story, if
this was what every child inherited as part of the psychological legacy of their culture.
But more immediately, we need to make sure that this new story is our story, that it is
fully installed within our own psyches, completely replacing the cosmic tragedy of the
story of the fall.
Notes and Quotes:
“Your spiritual eye can sleep, but remember, a sleeping eye can still see.” (T-
2.II.13:5)
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Day 33: III. The Proper Use of Denial
Overview: Now that we believe a separation has occurred between us and God, we
find ourselves experiencing a tremendous amount of fear. Rather than using denial to
avoid this fear, however, the Course asks us to use it to “deny any belief that error can
hurt you.” (T-2.III.2:5) This, per the section title, is the proper use of denial.
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We often use denial to pretend that something we’re afraid of doesn’t exist. This tends
to make us feel better in the short-term, but the problem with this approach is that it
doesn’t make what we’re afraid of go away. It’s what the Course calls a “concealment
device” versus being a “corrective device” (T-2.III.2:6).
Denial as a corrective device means bringing all forms error (i.e. all forms of
lovelessness or “scraps of meanness”) into the light where we deny them the power to
hurt us. This process is so important that this section even goes as far as to say that
being “mentally healthy depends on it.” (T-2.III.2:7)
Remember the famous scene in the Wizard of Oz where Glenda the good witch waves
the evil witch away with a smile and says “Be gone. You have no power here?” We
have the ability to do that in any moment with our ego thoughts, regardless of how
frightening they seem. And then, as the last paragraph of this section states, we can
truly become miracle workers because, having established a “total lack of threat
anywhere” (T-2.III.12:2), we are able to work alongside Jesus on the task of expressing
love.
Question: How much do you use denial to avoid what you’re afraid of? Do you find
yourself denying the predatory nature of your ego (by calling it an illusion for example)
so you don’t have to look closely at the ways it’s at play in your life?
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Notes and Quotes:
“Denial of error is a very powerful defense of truth.” (T-2.III.10:1)
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Day 34: IV. The Reinterpretation of Defenses
Overview: This section provides a list of defense mechanisms we use to maintain
errored (i.e. loveless or ego) thinking, however Jesus reinterprets each one as a
defense of truth. Projection, for example, can be used by us to project judgment onto
others or we can “project” mercy and right-mindedness. Since “everyone defends his
own treasure” (T-2.IV.13:2), this section is asking us to look closely at what it is we
treasure and what effect this choice is having on our lives.
Question: Do you recognize yourself in any of the defense mechanisms listed in this section? In what ways do you “defend” your ego and how can you reframe your thinking to defend truth? _____________________________________________________________
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“Denial should be directed only to error, and projection should be limited to
truth.” (T-2.IV.2:1)
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Day 35: V. The Atonement as Defense Overview: In the CE Glossary of Course Terms, Atonement is defined as “reconciliation with God” (which, it’s worth adding, we attain by realizing that the split with Him was never real in the first place). Moreover, in the Manual for Teachers, it says healing and Atonement are “identical” (M-22.1:1). What we can conclude here is that, in the end, all of our sickness, all of our lack of wholeness, comes down to one thing: a sense of being split off from God. Accordingly, when this section speaks of Atonement as a defense, what it’s saying is that Atonement is a more effective psychological defense than our usual use of defense mechanisms. We usually use defense mechanisms, of course, to protect ourselves against unwanted emotions and to protect our image, our ego. Of course, while we are doing all that protecting of our image, we are also doing a lot of attacking. We are stacking up a big pile, in other words, of past mistakes, the crushing weight of which makes us even more defensive.
The defense that we really need is a mechanism that can come in and relieve us of the burden of these past mistakes, a mechanism that can protect our true innocence. This section speaks of the Atonement as a power that we can actually call on, which then comes in and undoes old patterns in our minds, relieving us of their heavy weight.
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What does the Atonement actually do? Or more specifically, what does it do for us?
This one is answerable based on the section itself: “It undoes your past errors, thus
making it unnecessary for you to keep retracing your steps without advancing toward
your return” (T-2.V.6:5). So the Atonement undoes our past errors, so that we don’t just
stay in their grip and forever just spin our wheels, going nowhere.
- Robert Perry
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Question: Do you recognize the perfection of your own inner self and see this same
perfection in others? What needs to be brought to the light in order for you to see
yourself as “both a brother and a Son?” (T-2.V.9:3)
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“The Atonement is the device by which you can free yourself from the past as
you go ahead.” (T-2.V.6:4)
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