The Art of Not Making It Real

Posted on by Tammy

By Gary Renard

One of the most important tenets of “A Course in Miracles” (ACIM), if you are actually interested in doing the Course, could be put in just four words: Don’t make it real.

More specifically, don’t make this illusion of a world or anything in it real in your mind because the world you see is your projection, which has no inherent reality. With the Course, you don’t forgive people because they really did something to you; you don’t forgive situations because they’re really happening; and you don’t forgive the events you see on the news because they are true. You forgive everything because nothing has really happened except in a dream of your own making; a script you authored and then forgot you made up. As the Course puts it, “We forgive our brother for what he hasn’t done.”

If ACIM is saying anything, it’s saying nothing has happened, and that “The full awareness of the Atonement is that the separation (from God) never occurred.” And because people haven’t really done anything, they are innocent. Few people like that idea at first, until an associated fact sinks in. And the truth of that statement doesn’t just mean other people are innocent. The most important thing is it must also mean that you are innocent. And you get in touch with your own innocence by seeing it everywhere.

The Secret to Salvation
Once in a while something will happen where I’m tempted to be upset. Maybe I’m on the Internet and I read someone saying something very nasty about me. Never mind that they never met me, don’t know me, and have no idea what they’re talking about. You would think, given the confidence with which they make their pronouncements, that they know everything about me. There are a lot of angry people out there, and the Internet is the perfect place for them to project their unconscious guilt onto others. Of course they don’t know that they’re projecting. They just think they’re right and their anger is justified. But as the Course would say to them, “Anger is never justified,” and “Attack has no foundation.” Indeed, the Course even gives us the secret to salvation: “You are doing this unto yourself.”

So, if I’m tempted to be upset, then I have to catch myself and stop. If I’m feeling upset I must be making it real. Why? Because if I wasn’t making it real then I wouldn’t be upset. The second that I remember the truth, the uncomfortableness goes away.

Every now and then I’ll get an e-mail with a complaint, or several complaints about something; my books are too absolute and uncompromising, my jokes are too smart assed, etc. Invariably, the e-mail concludes with the words, “I forgive you.” I write back to them saying, no, they haven’t forgiven me or their grievance. If they learned ACIM they’d know that the problem is, “You have made it real, and so you cannot forgive it.”

Practicing True Forgiveness
Not making it real is the smoothest short cut to practicing true forgiveness. Knowing there is a truth just beyond the illusory veil, a world unseen yet truly there, and that the world we see is a trick of the ego, makes it possible to get to the fact of the matter quickly instead of losing our peace. As a character once said in a movie, “The Matrix is an illusion to pull the wool over your eyes and stop you from seeing the real world.” Of course the movie didn’t go all the way and acknowledge God as the truth beyond the illusion, but hey, it’s a good start.

Thinking that people are bodies, and those bodies are real, is what the Course would call egocentricity. In a message to Helen Schucman, the scribe of the Course, Jesus was talking to her about always saying yes to people and not being able to say no. He brought up Edgar Cayce, who worked relentlessly and died younger than he should have, as an example of not being able to say no. Then Jesus made a very interesting statement, “If you cannot say no to the requests of others, you have not yet overcome egocentricity.”

If you can’t say no, then you’re saying to your own mind this is a real person, and they have a real problem, and this problem really has to be solved, and you’re the one who really has to solve it. And by extension you’re saying you are also a real body in a real world. You’re making the whole enchilada true. Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t help people. But if you do, then you should do it after asking the Holy Spirit, if there is time. And don’t help them out of guilt or because you think you have to. Help them as an expression of love.

In the future, when the human race has a deeper understanding of quantum physics, recognizes the illusory nature of the universe more completely, and begins to understand the cause and process of projection, then the idea of forgiveness will make much more sense and be seen as the self-forgiving dynamic that it is. But you don’t have to wait for the world. You can end your suffering forever, in this lifetime. You can do this by recognizing that everyone you meet and everything in this world is a symbolic representation of that which is hidden in your own unconscious mind. And by forgiving what you see, you are forgiving yourself. Thus will your mind be healed through the activation of Spirit. And when it is completely healed you will have the peace of God and attain the state of enlightenment.

Forgiveness of everything and everyone you perceive, by not making it real and instead choosing the reality of Spirit, is necessary if you are to experience complete forgiveness for yourself. As “A Course in Miracles” asks you, “Can you to whom God says, ‘Release My Son!’ be tempted not to listen, when you learn that it is you for whom He asks release? And what but this is what this course would teach? And what but this is there for you to learn?”

ABOUT GARY RENARD
Gary Renard is the bestselling author of “The Disappearance of the Universe” trilogy, including “Your Immortal Reality,” and his latest, “Love Has Forgotten No One: The Answer to Life ” — all based on “A Course in Miracles.” As a teacher and worldwide speaker, Renard has taught “A Course in Miracles” in 24 countries and 43 states, appeared in seven documentary movies, won the Infinity Foundation Spirit Award, and hosts a monthly podcast. For more information, visit www.garyrenard.com.

A Course in Miracles: Forgiveness Opportunities

Posted on by Tammy

By Gary Renard

About 12 years ago, shortly after the release of my first book, “The Disappearance of the Universe,” I started an online study group at Yahoo about the book and “A Course in Miracles.” It has gone on to become the largest Course study group in the world. That’s where I met and became good friends with Gene Bogart, who produces and cohosts my podcasts with me. We do them every month or so, and it’s been great fun, as well as educational. Both the study group and the podcasts stick to the Course, which can lead to lively conversations when there are people asking questions who don’t want to stick to the Course.

We’re often asked what the Course means, and we usually start by saying the best way to know what it means is to go by what it says. That may seem obvious, but the Course says a lot of things people don’t want to hear. For example, it says, “There is no world!” This is the central thought the Course attempts to teach. Most people don’t want to hear that.

Most people want the world and the things in it they are attracted to, hoping at the same time the bad things will not come to them, or at least not be too bad. Yet the Course also says (with the Voice of the Course, Jesus, speaking in the first person), “I once asked you to sell all you have and give to the poor and follow me. This is what I meant: If you have no investment in anything in this world, you can teach the poor where their treasure is. The poor are merely those who have invested wrongly, and they are poor indeed!”

The Course is talking here about our psychological investment. Its teachings are always done at the level of the mind, not at the level of the physical. Letting go of your psychological investment in the world and putting your belief where it belongs is a process. It doesn’t happen overnight, which is a good thing. If it happened too fast, it would engender fear. The mind has to be prepared for the higher life form that is your true home. This home is your oneness with God.

You prepare yourself to go home by undoing the ego and gradually letting the Holy Spirit become the dominant force in your mind, and in the end, the only force in your mind. True forgiveness, the first step of which was described in my last article, is what facilitates this undoing process.

There will be many opportunities to forgive. During the first year of our Yahoo study group, we coined a phrase for these opportunities. We started to call them JAFO. This is an acronym for “Just another forgiveness opportunity.” The phrase is born of the fact that there will always be forgiveness opportunities as long as you appear to be here. However, it’s possible to get to the point where these forgiveness opportunities cannot affect you. When that time finally arrives on your spiritual path, these JAFOs will cease to be challenging and forgiveness will be automatic.

The Second Step of Forgiveness
Once you’ve learned to stop yourself from reacting with the ego, which takes determination and discipline, you can go on to the second step in forgiveness. Eventually, all three steps will blend into one, and you will do them as a habit without having to think much at all about the steps. You’ll just know. This is much like the Zen concept of just knowing as unarticulated truth. But at first it’s essential to learn and practice the steps so you know what you’re doing, and so you know what it is you’re choosing between. That’s how the steps become a part of you, and you’ll know they’re a part of you when you miss forgiveness if you don’t do it. One of the reasons for that is you’ll know you are the one who is actually getting the benefits of doing it.

The second step in true forgiveness involves what the Course calls the “Holy Instant.” That’s the instant you switch from thinking with the ego to thinking with the Holy Spirit. The ego has been telling you what you’re seeing is real, that the body is real, that you have a real problem you need to take care of with real people in a real world. The Holy Spirit has a totally different story.

What you’re seeing is not true. It’s a projection that’s coming from your own unconscious mind, and it’s possible to experience that. People are not bodies, they are still perfect spirit at home in God; they have merely forgotten. The Course asks you, “What if you recognized this world is a hallucination? What if you really understood you made it up? What if you realized that those who seem to walk about in it, to sin and die, attack and murder, and destroy themselves, are wholly unreal?”

Eventually it would be impossible for you to ever react to the world the same way you used to, and in choosing the Holy Spirit you are taking the second of three steps that awakens spirit in yourself. As the Course teaches, “Mind is the activating agent of spirit.” By choosing spirit, you activate it in your own mind. The Course also says, “…miracles heal because they deny body-identification and affirm spirit-identification.”

The world we once believed in is a dream, and nothing more. Shakespeare was right. “We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” The Course asks you, “…who reacts to figures in a dream unless he sees them as if they were real? The instant that he sees them as they are, they have no more effects on him, because he understands he gave them their effects by causing them and making them seem real.”

This is lucid dreaming on a whole new level. Eventually you become aware that you’re dreaming. Every JAFO is equally forgivable. Maybe the things you thought were so heavy and important aren’t. You begin to relax. Real peace of mind is yours. Ironically, you function better in the dream because you can think more clearly, and you have the guidance and inspiration of the Holy Spirit to lead you.

But the Course doesn’t stop there. It takes you all the way home. In the next article we’ll examine step three, which is spiritual sight. You’ll learn to see the way the Holy Spirit does, and thus get in touch with what you really are.

Marianne Williamson: Trusting Others and A Course in Miracles

Posted on by Tammy

Based on “A Course in Miracles,” bestselling author, Marianne Williamson gives a live talk every Monday in Los Angeles (also available via Livestream anywhere in the world) to teach the principles of “miracle mindedness.” During a talk in late July, she focused on trusting others.

“To the extent to which our thought system is based on fear, or non-miraculous thinking, we bind ourselves to the experience of the world of scarcity and death,” she said. “As we shift our thinking from fear to love, we literally shift into a place where a process of divine intercession — a thought system beyond our own, an actual celestial order of love and harmony — then enters into our experience of this world. Because we transform our thinking, we can transform the effect that thinking has caused.”

“A Course in Miracles” tells us we are perfect, and the core belief and thought within that miracle-minded thought system is the recognition of that perfections, Williamson shared with the audience. However, because the Course tells us we are all connected, meaning there is really only one of us existing in this world, we cannot recognize the perfection of our spiritual being unless we are willing to recognize it in another.

Quoting Lesson 181 from “A Course in Miracles,” Williamson read: “Trusting your brothers is essential to establishing and holding up your faith in your ability to transcend doubt and lack of sure conviction in yourself.”

Trust is a big issue for many people, but only if we trust others can we actually trust ourselves, because any thought we have about another is a thought about ourselves, she said.

“If I think lovingly about you, that is an act of self-care, because I myself will feel ultimately more nourished as I am willing to think more lovingly about you. If I think attack thoughts about you, ‘A Course in Miracles’ says, a sword is dropping over their head and in the realm of reality where there is not time and space, a sword is dropping on me as well.”

Additionally, if we hold the thought and belief that people cannot be trusted, the Course teaches we create what we defend against, so our subconscious mind will set things up in such a way that we will create it. People make mistakes, and we make mistakes, but the question is what we choose to focus on.

“A Course in Miracles” states: “Perception has a focus. It is this that gives consistency to what you see. Change but this focus, and what you behold will change accordingly. Your vision will shift, to give support to the intent which has replaced the one you held before.”

While the ego mind intends to focus on the guilt of another, the spirit within wants to focus on their innocence, Williamson said. We can make a choice to shift our perception in any moment.

“The ego will use your mistakes as evidence for why you deserve it and the spirit in me chooses to extend my perception beyond what the bodies eyes reveal to what the spiritual eye revels, which is the truth in you,” she explained. “I can choose what I intend to see, and when we choose to see the innocence in another person, the Course says this is an act of self-interest, and a gentle reinterpretation of the world. And when we gently reinterpret into miracle mindedness, we see all human behavior as either love, which obviously calls for love to be returned, or as a call for love. In the moment we behave like jerks, the spirit is saying ‘I’m trapped in here. Love me. Because if you condemn me in this place, I’m only going to be worse.’”

Faith in Sinlessness
Quoting from Lesson 181, Williamson said: “Remove your focus on your brother’s sins and you experience the peace that comes from faith in sinlessness. This faith in sinlessness receives its own sure support from what you see in others past their sins. For their mistakes if focused on are witnesses to sins in you. And you will not transcend their sight and see the sinlessness that lies beyond.”

The Course views sins as errors or mistakes to be corrected. But if we limit our focus to the errors of others, we are also binding ourselves to our own errors, she said. Since the level of our errors is not truly who we are, we cannot feel comfortable I our own skin. The only way we can escape our own feelings of self-hatred is to be willing to have faith in the sinlessness of another.

“This is why ‘A Course in Miracles’ says heaven — which is an awareness of our oneness, and the inner peace that comes from that, not later but in this moment — is entered two by two,” she shared. “I cannot get into heaven unless I am willing to take you there with me. If I am binding you to your guilt, I cannot escape feeling the hell of feeling guilt myself.”

The course says we achieve so little because we have undisciplined minds. Just as we exercise our bodies and discipline our muscles, we must do the same for our minds, Williamson said. The ego can take over, or we can instruct our mind and say, “These attach thoughts only hurt me. I am willing to be miracle minded here.”

“Miracle mindedness in any moment is our willingness in any moment to align our thinking with the will of God. We have been trained to look at the world as ‘Do I want to serve the will of God, or do I want to be happy and I can get what I really need?’ and this is ego-oriented,” Williamson noted. “In any moment, when our goal is the perception of sinlessness, then our goal is to rest in heave — meaning our awareness of our oneness, meaning the place we can be happy, meaning the palce where people want to get along with us, meaning the celestial order where our highest good is already programmed.”

For more from Marianne Williamson, and to sign up for her Free Monday Night Livestream, visit www.marianne.com.

Emerging Women Live Coverage Part 3: Gabrielle Bernstein – Miracles Now

Posted on by Tammy

On Sunday of the 2nd annual Emerging Women Live conference “Changing the World Through Feminine Leadership and Entrepreneurship,” in New York City, Gabrielle Bernstein, New York Times bestselling author of “May Cause Miracles” and “Miracles Now,” took the stage to discuss the power of our presence.

Bernstein shared how she was once running a PR company and on the outside it looked like she had all she desired to be successful and happy — but on the inside her world was falling apart. She was addicted to drugs and alcohol, and when she woke up at 25 years old in a stranger’s apartment not knowing where she was or how she got there, she realized she needed to change.

She went home, opened her journal and wrote — “there has to be a better way.” She then heard the voice of her intuition for the first time — an inner voice — tell her to “get clean and you will live a life beyond your wildest dreams.” She realized she needed to stop looking outside herself for what she already had within her.

“I got clean. I found a recovery group, and immediately spun back into this childlike faith I had forgotten,” she shared with the audience. “Within a month I was guided to a beautiful mentor in my recovery group who said, ‘I have a book for you.’ She handed me Marianne Williamson’s ‘A Return to Love,’ which is basically the cliff notes for a metaphysical book ‘A Course in Miracles.’ I read the entire book in one night.”

Bernstein decided to become a student of “A Course in Miracles” and began doing the workbook. The Course teaches that “through the experience of forgiveness we reorganize our beliefs systems and shift to love…the moment we choose again, to forgive, to see as situation with a loving lens instead of a fearful lens,” is when miracles occur, she said.

She shared five principles with the audience that she has been using to change her perceptions and shift from fear to love for the past nine years. These include:

1. Become the Non-Judgmental Witness of Your Fear — She asked the audience to be willing to take a fearless inventory of what is going on in their lives and take full ownership of what it means to be in negativity and fear. “Yes I am an addict I’m not stepping into my power. I’m talking a lot of shit about people. I am stuck in fear. I am stuck in a bad relationship,” she said. “But in a non judgmental way so you don’t get stuck in fear. Get brutally honest with yourself and your notebook. What is it that you want to transform?” It’s about owning if you are not showing up for your husband, business, etc. and accepting where you are first.

2. Invite In a Higher Power — She shared a line from the Course that says: The presence of fear is a sure sign that you are relying on your own strength. “How are you blocking and controlling the natural flow of your life by relying on your own strength, and how do you get to a place where you can start to redirect?” she asked, explaining we can all tap into a higher presence, whether we call it God, inspiration, energy or the Universe. She shared a daily prayer she uses every morning directly from the Course: “Where would you have me go, what would you have me do, what would you have me say and to whom?”

She also urged the audience to take up a meditation practice, as she has found it to be the most important tool she has in her life. “What I find to be most important to me in my life, more than husband, work, family and friends, is the time I spend on my meditation pillow,” she said. “My meditation has offered me everything. Why I’m standing here today, why I’m a New York Times bestselling author, why I have a healthy relationship, why I have a healthy body, and why I can live in this city [New York]. Do you want to go big in your life? My answer is meditate.”

3. Measure Your Success By How Much Fun You Are Having — “Joy is your responsibility,” she said. “We need to elevate joy in our own lives. If you are feeling powerless, lean toward joy . . . release the littleness, the story of ‘I’m not where I want to be yet,’ or ‘my guy sucks’ and say I’m going to show up.’”

4. Our presence is Our Power — It’s not how well we are dressed or what it says on our business card or even what we say or do for a living — our power is how we be, said Bernstein. “Have you even been in the presence of someone who is really embodying who they are? You feel good. Because you can recognize yourself,” she said. “ In every given situation, if you are leaning toward joy, you will be guided to show up, and you will be guided to your power and to be.”

5. Be the Light — “In any given moment we have the capacity to show up with our darkness or we can be the light,” she explained. “Any given moment offers the opportunity to show back up, to choose again. You can smother the darkness and dissolve all boundaries with love. Take ownership and bring the light.”

As a result of practicing these principles, Bernstein said she truly has created a life far beyond her wildest dreams and just celebrated nine years of recovery and one year of marriage. She also shared a mantra mediation for people to use to bring them out of negativity. It is “Ek Ong Kar Sat Gur Prasad,” and the music she played was from “Meditations for Transformation: The Expansive Spirit,” by Jai-Jagdesh.”

Read Part 1 with Kris Carr on Resilience

Read Part 2 with Sera Beak on Unleashing Your Soul’s Voice

Read Part 4 with Danielle LaPorte

Emerging Women Live Coverage Part 1: Kris Carr on Resilience

Posted on by Tammy

The 2nd annual Emerging Women Live conference “Changing the World Through Feminine Leadership and Entrepreneurship,” took place October 9-12, 2014 in New York City — the brainchild of Chantal Pierrat, who served as vice president of sales and marketing for Sounds True publishing company for more than 10 years. She opened the conference explaining how fierce competitiveness used to be the way to achieve success, and now it’s about partnership and collaboration.

“In 10 years women are inheriting two-thirds of this nations wealth and it means working together collectively and empowering ourselves as an individual,” she said opening the conference Thursday night. “Emerging means to come into being, transformation, to become manifest, to come into view, to come out from under. It’s not just happening to women. It’s happening to the feminine.”

She quoted statistics such as 17 percent of boards have women represented, and only 3 percent of women are CEO’s in the United States. But assured the audience, the trends are changing at an amazing rate.

“Right now so we have momentum behind us, and that momentum is turning into an emergence,” she said. “Some studies of major corporations show those most inclusive of women at the top are performing 35 percent better than their counterparts. Diversity is the future. Polarity breeds creativity.”

Kris Carr: The Feminine Side of Resilience
Bestselling author of “Crazy Sexy Diet” and “Crazy Sexy Kitchen,” Kris Carr — known for her passion around green juice and wellness — started her keynote speech talking about the concept of emerging, and explaining like healing, emerging is a process.

“Emerging happens in cycles, it happens in seasons, and your job is to know what season you are in,” she said. “When you know the season you are in you don’t force it. You don’t push the river.”

When we honor our natural rhythm and cycle we get closer to our purpose, which has nothing to do with our vocation or mission, she shared. Our purpose is joy, and we need to evaluate everything we do in our lives from our relationships to our businesses, and ask is this bringing us closer to joy our further away from it? The same is true for the people we are hanging out with — “are they inspiring you or are they tiring you?” she asked the audience.

Our spiritual assignment is to have a dialogue with ourselves on a regular basis to check in and see what we need to feel “sturdy, strong and empowered,” because the more we have this dialogue the more we will become connected with ourselves. For Carr, she knows she needs more time alone and embracing the fact that she is an introvert rather than an extrovert, to hang with solid girlfriends, men in her life that support her, to play on a regular basis, and to have a three-dimensional life, she said.

“What is one thing you need in order to connect with your resilience and with yourself,” she asked the audience.

Carr shared her story of being diagnosed with an incurable form of Stage 4 cancer at age 30, and how she revamped her self-care and diet to learn how to thrive with the disease — eventually giving up the desire to cure it.

“Self-care became my spiritual practice at 31,” she explained, recalling the time she first met the divine feminine in herself. “I met the divine feminine and she said ‘surrender it all. There is a difference between curing and healing. Curing is the physical body — the body you will not have forever. Healing is the spiritual body, and that is what you need to focus on my love, my darling. Learn to accept yourself, my darling.’ You have to love the broken parts of yourself as well. It’s all you, and it’s all teaching you something. It’s all magnificent.”

And acceptance or surrender does not be giving up or putting up with things that you should not from others. It means we never abandon ourselves. It means making our relationship with ourselves — that connection or spiritual assignment — the most important endeavor and commitment we will ever make, said Carr.

“From that place your resilience shines. Nothing can topple you over. As you go for those dreams, take with this mentality you will and enjoy the entire process, not just the accomplishment,” she said. “My challenge I want to offer you is that as you experience this beautiful weekend, and as you get lit up and inspired by all the new tools you want to try, that you remember what you already have … remember to celebrate something you already have. The more you do that, the more you will give permission to this world to do the same.”

Read Part 2 with Sera Beak: Unleashing Your Soul’s Voice HERE

Read Part 3 with Gabrielle Bernstein: Miracles Now HERE

Read Part 4 with Danielle LaPorte HERE