One Problem, One Solution
The Joyous Undoing of Your Conceptual Self-Identity
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Welcome to another lesson in A Course in Miracles. It's good to see you again within this memory package of the idea that we could have been separate from God. The idea that there is a systematic way at last for you in time to change your mind about who you thought you were within your own self-identity, the idea that you were actually a human being; you're not. The idea that you occupied a body in which you had to breathe oxygen and carbon and nitrogen, and all the other molecular associations of identity that manifest your idea about who you are and they are not true. They never were true and they never will be. |
This is A Course in Miracles from my savior and the savior of this world, Jesus Christ, who is firmly implanted within your own mind, offering you the light of his mind if you will accept it. And it is based entirely on the rhetoric of the heritage of your testament of identity within your own culture in your search for a savior. And I'm here within your own time frame, whatever you think you are in this short 40,000 years in which you manifest yourself, showing you the entirety of the inevitable capacity for you in an evolutionary process to undergo an experience that will eliminate the necessity for you to remain in that cocoon of nothingness. Because I assure you, until you begin to see the light that's all around you, you cannot see that you have been entrusted with the gifts of God, which represent eternal life.
Now somehow, I managed to get to Lesson 166, which is going to say that each one of you out there in the world is entrusted with the gifts of God, with perfect love and perfect wholeness, and that includes you! This Course In Miracles is training your mind, perhaps successfully, to the realization, although you may be walking around in this world, maybe you're watching this on a lunch break, maybe you're watching it at 2:00 in the morning or together in a bunch of you who now are beginning to recognize your individual selves with the emergence of the entirety of your own recognition of yourself. You're walking around in the world and all of a sudden you're turning and looking at what you thought was a complete stranger and you're recognizing that you know him. Of course you know him! You know everyone in the world in a literal sense. It is impossible that any manifestation contained within this illusion of body form is not a part of your own mind.
My, I took a big step there, didn't I? Dare I ask you, conceptual denial of eternal life, to look within yourself and see what's available to you? It's going to cause a loss of everything that you loved, isn’t it? Momentarily you're going to lose that necessity to have prostate cancer. Oh, what a threat! I'm threatening you that you are not going to be able to get sick, you're not going to be able to get old, you're not going to be able to die. What a threat!
"Oh that's ridiculous! Why would I want to listen to this guy? What's he going to tell me? Is he going to tell me that life is eternal? Is he going to tell me I'm not from here? Is he going to tell me that everything that I have ever looked at in this conceptual idea, is not true? Is he going to remind me, as my savior did that my father has been a liar from the beginning, and that everything he's ever told me about God seeking vengeance is not true? Is he going to appear now as my savior within my own mind or as manifest within this world, in our shared love, and inform me that we actually came from Heaven together and that we're returning together and as long as we remain here and bind ourselves we can never escape it?"
Do you see how excited you got me in my certainty that you're beginning to hear it? We're getting thousands of reports, millions now, and they're all individual recognitions in what was formerly a self-containment. Can you see that with me? Lesson 166 says you're carrying around, in this dreary idea of your dream of death, your own christhood. But as long as you condemn yourself in your own condemnation, in your own denial, in your own attack on your enemy and your brother within your own mind, you can't know the entirety of the solution.
What I want you to share with me now if you will, in my mind, in my representation of my certainty of you in this time and place, is that the answer is contained only within you. You've heard that conceptually since you had an idea about God. You've heard that conceptually since you asked for help from what you were told was your creator. You've looked together with me at the idea that there was a solution to your problem in asking for help. All you needed from me was the certainty that any problem or question that you could ask within your own mind, could be answered very simply by the idea that you have only one problem and that's yourself. That’s your need to seek for help and not recognize it within the ideas you have about yourself in the multiple problems that you believe exist in your conceptual identity.
You have one problem, and that’s separation from everything that is. You have one solution: undo it in your mind. Stop trying to discover in your own conceptual self, a solution that is not there. There is nowhere in your continuing organization of the idea of separation where the solution lies.
That's the joy of this lesson. Because this lesson, and we’re going to read some of it now, is going to tell you that all the human beings are walking around, in a literal sense, with the kingdom of God within them. And they're manifesting themselves in the chaos of form that disappears in the dust. What does Jesus say in the New Testament? “Tear that temple down, and I'll rebuild it in three days.” And from that moment on they were really after him, weren’t they? They were very determined, as you may still be, that I would not be allowed to demonstrate to you my certainty that you’re not brick and mortar, my certainty that all the things that you are formulating within your own mind are just existences of definitions of a long time ago and a long time to come in the ruins of what no longer exists. Now, what you had to learn from me is you can build out there from all the ruins you want and they will result in ruins untill you recognize that the kingdom is within you. This is what Lesson 166 is going to say. Let's look at it together:
Lesson 166: I Am Entrusted With The Gifts Of God
All things are given you. God's trust in you is limitless. He knows His Son. He gives without exception, holding nothing back that can contribute to your happiness. And yet, unless your will is one with His, His gifts are not received. But what would make you think there is another will than His?
Here is the paradox that underlies the making of the world. This world is not the Will of God, and so it is not real. Yet those who think it real must still believe there is another will, and one that leads to opposite effects from those He wills. Impossible indeed; but every mind that looks upon the world and judges it as certain, solid, trustworthy and true believes in two creators; or in one, himself alone. But never in one God.
The gifts of God are not acceptable to anyone who holds such strange beliefs. He must believe that to accept God's gifts, however evident they may become, however urgently he may be called to claim them as his own, is to be pressed to treachery against himself. He must deny their presence, contradict the truth, and suffer to preserve the world he made.
Are you listening to this, humans?
Here is the only home he thinks he knows. Here is the only safety he believes that he can find. Without the world he made is he an outcast; homeless and afraid. He does not realize that it is here he is afraid indeed, and homeless, too; an outcast wandering so far from home, so long away, he does not realize he has forgotten where he came from, where he goes, and even who he really is.
Yet in his lonely, senseless wanderings, God's gifts go with him, all unknown to him. He cannot lose them. But he will not look at what is given him. He wanders on, aware of the futility he sees about him everywhere, perceiving how his little lot but dwindles, as he goes ahead to nowhere. Still he wanders on in misery and poverty, alone though God is with him, and a treasure his so great that everything the world contains is valueless before its magnitude.
What a particular idea! Boy, it's great to read that. Are you aware, perceptual identities out there, what this is offering you? This is a statement about you. And how you feel about the rhetoric, I am not concerned. What it’s actually a statement of is a proviso for an entrance into your drama of loneliness and death of a true you. You want to share that together with me? This is why sometimes we revert to parables. There is no question you believe you are a conceptual self-existence wandering about this world, looking for an occupation that will justify your need to retain your own sorry looking self.
The reason that you reject this message is simply because you may not like the definition of yourself that I'm giving you. I understand that in your lonely wandering you keep finding relief, don't you? You find moments of happiness with the bodies that are around you, and you share with them the certainty of your own existence of what you must define as happiness, since in your forlorn idea of the dream of death, you find happiness in pain, you find happiness in loneliness, and you believe that this is what your life is. You have forgotten that you have been misidentified in a moment of space/time that denied the entirety of reality. And you're wandering aimlessly about in your determination to hold on to that identity.
Do you see how you're identifying yourself there, Mr Body, Mrs Anybody? Do you see how you hold on to yourself in your determination to be the containment of that body and find other bodies that share your forlorn admission that you're in this little senseless pain of dark form?
Let's share together just a moment this alternative. Let's practice if we can just a moment of that realization, right there, that you're actually whole and perfect. Good. Could you see that? I got you to stop just for a moment and to step back. See, your mind has been so preoccupied with definitions of yourself, with needs to justify that existence, that the idea that you could begin to practice non-defensiveness, the idea that you could begin to experience alternatives that were not contained within the contingencies of your self-identity, is what is occurring. Can you see that?
This is the description of this lesson. This says that you're carrying with you a burden of perfection. Do you see that? Your mind is preoccupied with the burden of dark form ideas within your conceptual definition of yourself. You compare them in ratios of variant light factoring... Let's see if I can explain that to you. Some of your ideas about yourself have more power than others. Some of them you love, some of them you hate. But remember this, in this lesson, all of them are comparisons with what you're not. All of them justify the continuation of the duality that you think is necessary within your own mind to maintain the balance of death. Because by continuing to choose within your own containment, a definition of the body, you can never see the alternative that's available to you right now.
The time will come and did, when you will depart this earth. This from the teachings of Jesus. The time will come and did, he says, when you left here. I am reminding you within your own memory package, that dark form that you’re holding, that your burden is light.
Say that to me, “My burden is light.” Yes. See how light your burden becomes in your own mind when you release your necessity to define it within your own physical form? Can you see how joyous and happy that makes you, for what? No reason! It's a release of the defenses of your own conceptual self. It's the expression of a freedom that you are discovering within your own identity. And that's what this lesson says. This lesson says that you've been carrying that freedom around with you, but you've been afraid to use it because it will be a momentary loss of the burden that you thought you had to have. Your education, your conceptual identity, your occupation, your need to define yourself in a body, have all burdened you with your body identity that ensure the sickness and death that are inevitable in your conceptual self. None of them are true. There is no world. Remember Lesson 132 which said, “I loose the world from all I thought it was?” That's what we're practicing now, so you can see the truth of you that is contained within that conceptual mind.
Excepts from
I Am Entrusted With The Gifts Of God - Workbook Lesson 166
with The Master Teacher of A Course In Miracles
