HOW MANY TEACHERS OF GOD ARE NEEDED TO SAVE THE WORLD?
page 31, paragraph 2
HOW MANY TEACHERS OF GOD ARE NEEDED TO SAVE THE WORLD?
HOW MANY TEACHERS OF GOD ARE NEEDED TO SAVE THE WORLD?
1 The answer to this question is—one. ²One wholly perfect teacher, whose learning is complete, suffices. ³This one, sanctified and redeemed, becomes the Self Who is the Son of God. ⁴He who was always wholly spirit now no longer sees himself as a body, or even as in a body. ⁵Therefore he is limitless. ⁶And being limitless, his thoughts are joined with God’s forever and ever. ⁷His perception of himself is based upon God’s Judgment, not his own. ⁸Thus does he share God’s Will, and bring His Thoughts to still deluded minds. ⁹He is forever one, because he is as God created him. ¹⁰He has accepted Christ, and he is saved.
Past and Present
I am going to begin by sharing what I wrote several years ago. It is not true for me now, but I bet that a lot of people can relate. Then I will share what changed.
Before I began this section, I read through it to see what Jesus brings me in understanding as I do each paragraph!
I read this paragraph again and I felt my heart swell as I recognized it as both truth and possible. That one wholly perfect teacher can be me–the Teacher who carries the message. I can put aside my own judgment and accept only God’s. Because I am limitless I can accept Christ.
Ego Insanity
Immediately, the ego drags me back to earth and tries to bind me to its reality. It says that I cannot be this and it is arrogant to think so; more than arrogant, sinful. It reminded me of all the millions of false beliefs and judgments that are still fixed in my mind. What about those, it asks. It will take many lifetimes to undo all of that. What about all the errors from the past, some of which are awful, mortal sins. How could such a person stained with guilt be the One Self who is savior to all?
The ego is so very frightened of awakening. It is deathly afraid of God. I remind myself that I am not that, though I mostly believe I am exactly that. Holy Spirit, I am willing to turn my eyes from the ego vision of self, and fix them purposefully and determinedly on the Truth, but I need Your help. That scary picture of my self the ego shows me seems more real to me than the one You offer.
Purgatory?
But even when I look to the body and its personality in fear that this is all I am, I cannot really believe that either, and there goes my heart, soaring again at the thought of being one with All that Is! Hah! I may not be ready just yet to accept my place among God’s advanced Teachers, but I am never going to be able to believe that I am truly ego either. I seem to be in neither Heaven nor Hell. Perhaps there is a purgatory after all.
Contrast Last Year to This
(I wrote this only last year. Already I know that purgatory is just a thought in my mind, and one that is fading fast. I commit to accepting the Atonement and the Christ. I commit to doing this each day, each hour and minute of each day. This is all I am asked to do to experience God’s promise.)
From 2021. The ego was wrong. None of that stuff matters in the least and this is not an endless job. No, I haven’t joined Jesus as a mind completely healed. But what has happened, is that through the practice of A Course in Miracles, I have left behind almost everything that isn’t true. What this feels like is being at peace almost all the time. It feels like being happy and serene. It is not perfect peace and not perfect joy, but it will be. There is no doubt of that.
Here is how Jeffery Martin described my present experience in his book, The Finders.
“I have been freed of a considerable amount of my psychological conditioning and negative emotions. The experience of present moment awareness, inner peace, and wellbeing continues to grow and deepen. There is only one dominant emotion that feels like a mixture of various highly positive emotions and feelings such as compassion, joy, and love. These feel like facets of a single meta-emotion. He says that the emotion is not personal. Facets such as love are felt as divine or universal or at minimum, impersonal. Parts of negative emotions are still occasionally felt but only rarely full form. It can be summed up as an almost total absence of suffering but the bit that remains looms large.”
Healing
There is more but that is the main idea. I talk about this sometimes because if you read what I wrote originally, you can guess that just a few short years ago, I felt guilt, fear and regret–pretty much like most people in that way, and before ACIM, it was even worse. I repeat, none of that matters. My experience was that as sometimes frustrating and difficult as it felt, it was just a matter of watching my thoughts and sharing the ego thoughts with the Holy Spirit so He could heal my mind.
Sharing
What drives my life most now is the desire to share what I have with others. I didn’t decide on that, it just happened. It brings me joy to do so. I continue to grow but there is no efforting connected with it now. Watching my mind, to notice my feelings and I release the ones that don’t contribute to my peace and make me happy. I just mostly do whatever I am guided to do at the moment. One day, I will reach the level at which Jesus speaks in this section. I have to as do we all because that is our function and it is the Will of God.