ACIM Chapter 10. I. At Home in God, P 3, 4

ACIM Chapter 10. I. At Home in God, P 3, 4

I. At Home in God P 3

3 Would you bother to reconcile what happened in conflicting dreams, or would you dismiss both together if you discovered that reality is in accord with neither? You do not remember being awake. When you hear the Holy Spirit you may feel better because loving then seems possible to you, but you do not remember yet that it once was so. And it is in this remembering that you will know it can be so again. What is possible has not yet been accomplished. Yet what has once been is so now, if it is eternal. When you remember, you will know that what you remember is eternal, and therefore is now.

I am writing this Sunday night. I will dream tonight when I fall asleep, and probably a lot of impossible stuff will happen that will seem, in my dream state, to be perfectly normal. When I wake up in the morning, I will dream of something else. It will be impossible stuff having nothing to do with Reality, but I will think it is real while it is happening, just as I did in the night dream.  I can try to make sense of either one, and I can try to control either dream, but why would I? Instead, I could wake up from both dreams.

I think this is all a dream because the Holy Spirit has been helping me remember it is so. Right now, I am mostly taking His word for it because I don’t have an actual memory of Life, but evidently, there is some awareness. Otherwise, why would I listen to that message? Why would I even consider believing it? I remember when I first started studying the Course, I would sometimes stop reading it and I would wonder why I believed what it said. There was seemingly no reason to do so, yet I did believe it. I had some vague memory trying to rise up in my mind, and that memory beckoned me to continue.

I remember and then forget that I am at Home with God.

One day, I ate some ice cream, and my daughter brought me a box of pastries as part of my Mother’s Day gift. It was more sugar than I wanted to eat, but I did so anyway. The old ego story of “anything that tastes good is bad for you and makes you fat” was playing like crazy in my mind. But then, I had the thought that I wasn’t eating sugar; I was eating love. The pastries represented the love my daughter wanted me to experience. After a moment or two of feeling Heavenly, I went back to feeling guilty.

I was reminded of the lesson that it is impossible to see two worlds. I was trying to see a world where love rules and there is no guilt or punishment. And I was trying to see an opposite world where guilt is a cruel master and punishment inevitable. I can only exist in one of those worlds at any moment because they are opposed in every way. Jumping back and forth like I was doing is painful.

The good that came from it was that their contrast was a strong motivation to choose God. The world based on love is a happier dream, and choosing the happier dream will lead me to awaken from the dream. Nowadays, I only eat sweets occasionally, but when I do, I eat with relish rather than guilt. I am not so interested in the ego version of the world as I used to be.

I. At Home in God P 4

4 You will remember everything the instant you desire it wholly, for if to desire wholly is to create, you will have willed away the separation, returning your mind simultaneously to your Creator and your creations. Knowing them you will have no wish to sleep, but only the desire to waken and be glad. Dreams will be impossible because you will want only truth, and being at last your will, it will be yours.

I feel like saying, “The trick is,” to desire to be at Home in God, you must desire it wholly. Of course, it is not a trick; it is simply necessary. I cannot be at Home in God if I am not the same as God. I cannot keep anger, fear, guilt, sadness, blame, suffering, and death and expect to be in God. These are not God, so they cannot be in God. I must leave them behind to return to God.

It would not seem to be such a difficult choice, and yet, here I am with my grievances. Everyone in my life, even those most “special” to me, those I claim to love more than myself, become repositories for my guilt. I could easily release guilt and fear as well, but I hold onto it as if it were my very salvation. Though I have whittled this stuff down as I have looked at it with Spirit, I have not released it entirely, and I cannot enter the Kingdom with even a very little of what is not God.

I was thinking about Lesson 132, “I loose the world from all I think it is.”

This lesson tells me that there is no world. The world I think I see is just an out-picturing of my desires. It is a great big theater that always shows, The World According to Myron.” I re-write the script as my mind is healed because the world is nowhere except in my mind.

It is nothing except my thoughts, and my thoughts change when I change my mind about the source of those thoughts. When I choose to think with the ego mind, I will have an ego experience. I cannot bring the ego into the Kingdom, so I remain in the world I made up until I change my mind. When I decide to think the thoughts I think with God, my dream becomes a happy dream, and the world reflects that change until it disappears.

It is all up to me. It is my dream, and I must decide on the direction that dream will take. As I change my mind, the dream changes, and it is better. But do I want a better dream? Or do I want the Kingdom? Do I want to return to eternal bliss and full creation, or do I want to play around in the muck some more? If I choose to relinquish the ego mind completely, in that very moment, I will remember everything! It is just that simple. Or so I am told. Frankly, I can hardly believe I am still dreaming the world.