ACIM Chapter 10. II. The Decision to Forget, P 4-6

ACIM Chapter 10. II. The Decision to Forget, P 4-6

II. The Decision to Forget, P 4

4 When you attack, you are denying yourself. You are specifically teaching yourself that you are not what you are. Your denial of reality precludes the acceptance of God’s gift, because you have accepted something else in its place. If you understand that this is always an attack on truth, and truth is God, you will realize why it is always fearful. If you further recognize that you are part of God, you will understand why it is that you always attack yourself first.

When I attack someone, it is because I feel threatened. As I am in truth, I cannot be threatened. I am Spirit, the Son of God, invulnerable and perfectly safe. No harm has ever come to me and cannot ever come to me. But when I forget what I am and start thinking with the ego mind, I feel vulnerable, weak, and frail because I am identified first and foremost with the body rather than Spirit. I feel threatened by everything because the body seems open to attack by everything.

When I feel threatened, I want to defend myself, and so I attack. The two, attack and defense, are always seen together. Even if I feel attacked and don’t say or do anything, the thought of attack, the belief in attack, is in my mind, and that thought keeps me in a dark place. It creates guilt in my mind, and with guilt comes fear. This is not what I am, and as long as I believe it is, I will block the truth and deny myself the gifts of God.

While with a group of friends there was some strife between two of them.

I was not involved in it, but I could not avoid hearing the attacks and counterattacks. I saw this dynamic that I am learning about today being played out. After a while, I noticed that I was feeling stressed. I began to resent this intrusion on my peace, and that resentment was an attack.

Right away, I saw what I was doing. I saw that I was making them guilty for how I felt. Since I am very familiar with this ego tactic, immediately I asked that my mind be healed. I asked for peace, and to have peace, I must be willing to let go of what is blocking it. It was kind of funny the way the Holy Spirit helped me.

I received a phone call from a student.

She started the conversation by saying what she really wanted was peace. We had a long conversation about how to do this. We also talked about the necessity of letting go of the blocks to peace if peace is what we really want. It is not possible to have both peace and that which blocks peace.

We talked about how asking for peace but keeping the blocks in place isn’t going to work. We discussed processes that would help her change her mind so that she could let go of the need for people in her life to be what she thought she needed them to be. Then, we ended the conversation with a reminder that reading and talking about these truths will inspire us but will not heal us. For that, we have to use what we receive from the words.

After we had hung up, I was going over the conversation in my mind.

It felt pretty complete, and I thought it would be helpful. Then I had to laugh because I saw that the words I said to her were my answer from the Holy Spirit. My peace cannot be taken from me by anyone else. If I am feeling stressed by someone else’s situation, that is something that happened in my mind, and it is my mind that must be healed.

The thought that my peace depends on my environment being peaceful is wrong. Peace would not be worth much if it were so fragile and dependent on others. I had thought that my friends were attacking my peace, but that thought was an attack on them because it said they were guilty.

It was also an attack on myself because it said that I was threatened and vulnerable to that threat. Feeling threatened and vulnerable attacked my reality. It left me believing that I am not my holy Self, but rather the frightened and guilty body the ego believes in. I saw that no one was threatening my peace. I was threatening myself, and I easily returned to peace with that realization.

II. The Decision to Forget, P 5

5 All attack is Self attack. It cannot be anything else. Arising from your own decision not to be what you are, it is an attack on your identification. Attack is thus the way in which your identification is lost, because when you attack, you must have forgotten what you are. And if your reality is God’s, when you attack you are not remembering Him. This is not because He is gone, but because you are actively choosing not to remember Him.

I have understood and accepted that when I attack anyone, I am attacking myself. I know this is true because I feel the loss of peace, and I experience fear because when I attack, I am teaching myself that I can be attacked. But what Jesus is saying here is a little different. He is saying that when I attack, I attack my Self. All attack teaches me that I am something I am not. It obscures my reality because I am doing something that is completely outside my reality.

Further, he says that this is a deliberate choice. I lose all sense of my identity when I attack, and I do this because I want to forget who I am so I can be something else. I accept this as well. And I do understand now that I am not this body/personality that I have so closely identified with. I understand that I wanted to have this experience and so I did. I choose to forget this, and then I choose to remember it.

Back and forth, now, as I begin to awaken.

Ultimately, Jesus is explaining that the real loss for us is that in choosing to forget our true identity we are choosing to forget God. We are, in reality, an extension of God. Our reality is the same as God’s, and so to have a different experience, to know ourselves as less than divine, we must forget not only our identity, but we must forget God’s as well.

It is a little scary to realize that I deliberately chose to forget God and that every moment I choose to see myself as a body, as separate, I am doing it again. As Jesus has told us before, we did not destroy God or lose God; we just chose not to be aware of God, so we are not guilty. But when we deliberately forget God, we become afraid of God, not because he is scary, but because we forgot Him.

The ego mind argues that I didn’t forget God, that I think of God a lot and pray to Him. But I don’t remember God. I don’t remember His nature. I don’t remember what it feels like to be part of Him, and so I don’t remember my own nature or what it feels like to be my Self. But I am beginning to long for that memory to return to me. That has to be a good thing.

II. The Decision to Forget, P 6

6 If you realized the complete havoc this makes of your peace of mind you could not make such an insane decision. You make it only because you still believe it can get you something you want. It follows, then, that you want something other than peace of mind, but you have not considered what it must be. Yet the logical outcome of your decision is perfectly clear, if you will only look at it. By deciding against your reality, you have made yourself vigilant against God and His Kingdom. And it is this vigilance that makes you afraid to remember Him.

I have created a closed cycle that keeps me in the illusion. I made a decision to experience myself as separate from God and His Kingdom. And to keep this impossibility believable, I must be vigilant against the truth. I must dedicate myself to keeping reality from my awareness. How very hard that must be! As it turns out, the necessity of guarding against God is what causes fear of God.

Here is how I imagine it. I wanted to experience something entirely impossible, so I walled off a part of my mind. I made a room with a door that I could close. Now, I have a place where reality cannot intrude, and I am able to have the experience I want. But only as long as I am careful to keep that door closed and to guard against reality coming into my imaginary room, which will happen the moment I stop guarding against it.

Thus, the endless cycle.

I must, of necessity, keep reality at bay, or I cannot have this experience. This requires that I be vigilant against God, and this very act of vigilance against God makes me afraid of God. See how perfectly I set this up? See how the use of guilt and fear keeps the illusion in place?

How to get free of this closed cycle is the question. This was planned for, too. We might be curious creators playing in the field of infinite possibilities, but we are not powerful enough to actually undo Reality, nor would we want to. No, we have an exit strategy. We have the Truth in our mind waiting for us to call upon it. We have the Holy Spirit’s plan of salvation to help us remember our desire to awaken and to gently guide us through the process. For us, this plan is laid out in A Course in Miracles.

I was reading something from my contemplation of the lessons and realized it fit beautifully with what we are learning in the Text this morning. Here is what I got from it. See if you agree that it is a helpful addition to today’s paragraphs.

From Introduction to Review IV.

Jesus says that this review is preparing us for the second part of learning how the truth can be applied. It is getting us ready for what comes next. I like the sound of that. It feels like graduating to the next level in school, this anticipation of what comes next. Because everything so far has turned my thought system completely upside down, it at first seemed hard.

But really, all I am learning is that I am not the body and personality that I thought I was. This is not my life. And these are not even my thoughts that I seem to think all day long. What Jesus wants me to focus on now is that none of this could be true because my mind holds only what I think with God. So, if I seem to be thinking something that is clearly not what I would think with God, then I must not be thinking at all.

It doesn’t seem reasonable at first because I have given so much weight to this mind chatter and told myself that the ego mind I made up is just as real as the mind I share with God. But in reality, the ego mind that is filled with false thoughts is not real. It is just a construct made to experience something that is not possible.

My real mind holds only what I think with God.

Clearly, this is my salvation. Yes, I have a made-up mind, a construct to allow the separation idea to play out, but I also have the mind I share with God, which is my true mind. They are both within me, and that means I can become aware of my true mind any time I want to.

What is blocking my awareness? Guilt, fear, and all its variants stand between me and the state of Heaven, of knowing the Mind of God. How do I remove those blocks? I remove them by understanding that they are not real and that it is possible to be free of them and by wanting to be free. Then, the Holy Spirit removes them for me. It is simple and straightforward, however difficult it might seem.

Guilt feeds on itself and creates fear, which can paralyze. The ego mind makes it seem so terribly hard, so complicated. And yet, I don’t have to do anything to return to my God. I don’t have to learn to think differently. Nor do I have to get rid of the ego thoughts.  I only have to desire to remember because, in actuality, my mind holds only what I think with God.

The return is not about doing anything to be what I am. It is simply a matter of turning away from the belief that the dream is real and that I want to keep dreaming it. In that moment, reality comes rushing in, and I am that I am. I look forward to this review, to sitting in quiet and allowing the Word of God to do its healing work in my mind.