The Re-Awakening
part of the Atonement series on ACIM Speaks podcast

Never forget that the Sonship is your salvation, for the Sonship is your Soul. As God's Creation, it is yours and, belonging to you, it is His. Your Soul does not need salvation, but your mind needs to learn what salvation is. You are not saved from anything, but you are saved for glory. Glory is your inheritance, given your Soul by its Creator, that you might extend it. But, if you hate part of your own Soul, all your understanding is lost because you are looking on what God creates as yourself without love. And, since what He created is part of Him, you are denying Him His place in His own altar.

Could you try to make God homeless and know you are at home? Can the Son deny the Father without believing the Father has denied him? God's laws hold only for your protection and they never hold in vain. What you experience when you deny your Father is still for your protection, for the power of your will cannot be lessened without the intervention of God against it, and any limitation on your power is not the Will of God. Therefore, look only to the power that God gave you to save you, remembering that it is yours because it is His, and join with your brothers in His peace.

The peace of your Soul lies in its limitlessness. Limit the peace you share and your own Soul must be unknown to you. Every altar to God is part of your Soul because the Light He created is One with Him. Would you cut a brother off from the light that is yours? You could not do so if you realize that you can only darken your own mind. As you bring him back, so will your mind return. That is the law of God, for the protection of the wholeness of His Son.

Only you can deprive yourself of anything. Do not oppose this realization, for it is truly the beginning of the dawn of Light. Remember also that the denial of this simple fact takes many forms and these you must learn to recognize and oppose steadfastly and without exception. This is a crucial step in the reawakening. The beginning phases of this reversal are often quite painful, for, as blame is withdrawn from without, there is a strong tendency to harbor it within.

It is difficult at first to realize that this is exactly the same thing, for there is no distinction between within and without. If your brothers are part of you, and you blame them for your deprivation, you are blaming yourself. And you cannot blame yourself without blaming them.

That is why blame must be undone, not reallocated. Lay it to yourself and you cannot know yourself, for only the ego blames at all. Self blame is, therefore, ego identification and, as strong an ego defense as blaming others. You cannot enter God's presence if you attack His Son. When His Son lifts his voice in praise of his Creator, he will hear the Voice of his Father. But the Creator cannot be praised without His Son, for their glory is shared and they are glorified together. Christ is at God's altar, waiting to welcome His Son. But come wholly without condemnation, for otherwise you will believe that the door is barred and you cannot enter.

The door is not barred, and it is impossible for you to be unable to enter the place where God would have you be. But love yourself with the love of Christ, for so does your Father love you. You can refuse to enter, but you cannot bar the door which Christ holds open. Come unto me who holds it open for you, for while I live, it cannot be shut, and I live forever. God is my Life and Yours, and nothing is denied by God to His son. At God's altar, Christ waits for the restoration of Himself in you.

God knows His son as wholly blameless as Himself and He is approached through the appreciation of His Son. Christ waits for your acceptance of Him as yourself and His wholeness as yours. For Christ is the Son of God, who lives in His Creator and shines with His glory. Christ is the extension of the love and loveliness of God, as perfect as His Creator, and at peace with Him. Blessed is the Son of God, whose radiance is of His Father, and whose glory He wills to share as His Father shares it with Him.

There is no condemnation in the Son, for there is no condemnation in the Father. Sharing the perfect love of the Father, the Son must share what belongs to Him, for otherwise He will not know the Father or the Son. Peace be unto you who rest in God and in whom the whole Sonship rests.

A Holy Encounter

When you meet anyone, remember it is a holy encounter. As you see him, you will see yourself. As you treat him, you will treat yourself. As you think of him, you will think of yourself. Never forget this, for in him you will find yourself or lose sight of yourself. Whenever two Sons of God meet, they are given another chance at Salvation. Do not leave anyone without giving salvation to him and receiving it yourself, for I am always there with you, in remembrance of you.

The goal of the curriculum, regardless of the teacher you choose, is know thyself. There is nothing else to learn. Everyone is looking for himself and the power and the glory he thinks he has lost. Whenever you are with anyone else, you have another opportunity to find them. Your power and glory are in him because they are yours. The ego tries to find them in yourself because it does not know where to look. But the Holy Spirit teaches you that, if you look only at yourself, you cannot find yourself because that is not what you are.

Whenever you are with a brother, you are learning what you are because you are teaching what you are. He will respond either with pain or with joy, depending on which teacher you are following. He will be imprisoned or released according to your decision, And so will you. Never forget your responsibility to him because it is your responsibility to yourself. Give him his place in the Kingdom, and you will have yours. The Kingdom cannot be found alone, and you, who are the Kingdom, cannot find yourselves alone.

To achieve the goal of the curriculum, then, you cannot listen to the ego. It's purpose is to defeat its own goal. It does not know this because it does not know anything. But you can know this, and you will know it if you are willing to look at what the ego has made of you. This is your responsibility because, once you have really done this, you will accept the Atonement for yourself. What other choice could you make?

Having made this choice, you will begin to learn and understand why you have believed that, when you meet someone else, you have thought he was someone else. And every holy encounter in which you enter fully will teach you that this is not so. You can encounter only part of yourself because you are part of God, who is everything. His power and glory are everywhere and you cannot be excluded from them. The ego teaches that your strength is in you alone. The Holy Spirit teaches that all strength is in God and, therefore, in you.

God wills no one to suffer. He does not will anyone to suffer for a wrong decision you have made, including yourself. That is why He has given you the means for undoing it. Through His power and glory, all your wrong decisions are undone completely, releasing you and your brothers from every imprisoning thought any part of the Sonship has accepted. Wrong decisions have no power because they are not true. The imprisonment which they seem to produce is no more true than they are.

Power and glory belong to God alone. So do you. God gives whatever belongs to Him because He gives of Himself, and everything belongs to Him. Giving of your self is the function He gave you. Fulfilling it perfectly will teach you what you are in Him. You cannot be powerless to do this because this is your power. Glory is God's gift to you because that is what He is. See this glory everywhere to learn what you are.

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1. 1. The phrase, power and glory, are from the prayer that Jesus gave to his disciples, which is in the gospel of Matthew. The last part of the prayer is left out in Catholic versions; I am not sure why that is, but, "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever," came to be known as a doxology, that is, in a liturgical service, words spoken together by the congregation.

   In The Gospel of Matthew:

   6:8 Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.

   6:9 After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.

   6:10 Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.

   6:11 Give us this day our daily bread.

   6:12 And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

   6:13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.

   A variation on this prayer was given in A Course in Miracles. Bill Thetford found this prayer quite moving and a recording of his voice reading that passage from the Course is included in the podcast.

A Change in Direction

The first change that must be introduced is a change in direction. A meaningful curriculum cannot be inconsistent. If it is planned by two teachers, each believing in diametrically opposed ideas, it cannot be integrated. If it is carried out by these two teachers simultaneously, each one merely interferes with the other. This leads to fluctuation, but not to change. The volatile have no direction. They cannot choose one, because they cannot relinquish the other even if the other does not exist and gives them no rationale for choice.

The total senselessness of such a curriculum must be fully recognized before a real change in direction becomes possible. You cannot learn simultaneously from two teachers who are in total disagreement about everything. Their joint curriculum presents an impossible learning task. They are teaching you entirely different things in entirely different ways, which would be possible except for the crucial fact that both are teaching you about yourself. Your reality is unaffected by both. But, if you listen to both, your mind will split on what your reality is.

There is a rationale for choice. Only one teacher knows what your reality is. If learning that is the purpose of the curriculum, you must learn it of Him. The ego does not know what it is trying to teach. It is trying to teach you what you are without knowing it. The ego is expert only in confusion. It does not understand anything else. As a teacher, then, it is totally confused and totally confusing.

Even if you could disregard the Holy Spirit entirely, which is quite impossible, you could learn nothing from the ego because the ego knows nothing. Is there any possible reason for choosing a teacher such as this? Does the total disregard of anything it teaches make anything but sense? Is this the teacher to whom a Son of God should turn to find Himself? The ego has never given you a sensible answer to anything. Simply on the grounds of your own experience with the ego's teaching, should not this alone disqualify it as your future teacher?

But the ego has done more harm to your learning than this alone. Learning is joyful, if it leads you along your natural path and facilitates the development of what you have. But, when you are taught against your nature, you will lose by your learning because your learning will imprison you. Your will is in your nature and, therefore, cannot go against it. The ego cannot teach you anything as long as your will is free because you will not listen to it. It is not your will to be imprisoned because your will is free.

That is why the ego is the denial of free will. It is never God Who coerces you, because He shares His Will with you. His voice teaches only His Will, but that is not the Holy Spirit's lesson because that is what you are. The lesson is that your will and God's cannot be out of accord because they are one. This is the undoing of everything the ego tries to teach. It is not, then, only the direction of the curriculum which must be un-conflicted, but also the content.

The ego wants to teach you that you want to oppose God's Will. This unnatural lesson cannot be learned, but the attempt to learn it is a violation of your own freedom and makes you afraid of your will because it is free. The Holy Spirit opposes any imprisoning of the will of a Son of God, knowing that the will of the Son is the Father's. He leads you steadily along the path of freedom, teaching you how to disregard, or look beyond, everything that would hold you back.

We said before that the Holy Spirit teaches you the difference between pain and joy. That is the same as saying that He teaches you the difference between imprisonment and freedom. You cannot make this distinction without Him. That is because you have taught yourself that imprisonment is freedom. Believing them to be the same, how can you tell them apart? Can you ask the part of your mind that taught you to believe they are the same to teach you the difference?

The Holy Spirit's teaching takes only one direction and has only one goal. His direction is freedom, and His goal is God. But He cannot conceive of God without you, because it was not God's Will to be without you. When you have learned that your will is God's, you could no more will to be without Him than He could will to be without you. This is freedom and this is joy. Deny yourself this, and you are denying God His Kingdom because He created you for this.

When we said, "all power and glory are yours because the Kingdom is His," this is what we meant: The Will of God is without limit, and all power and glory lie within it. It is boundless in strength and in love and in peace. It has no boundaries because its extension is unlimited and it encompasses all things because it created all things. By creating all things, it made them part of itself. You are the Will of God, because this is how you were created. Because your Creator creates only like Himself, you are like Him.

You are part of Him Who is all power and glory, and are, therefore, as unlimited as He is. To what else except all power and glory can the Holy Spirit appeal to restore God's Kingdom? His appeal, then, is merely to what the Kingdom is, and for its own acknowledgment of what it is. When you acknowledge this, you bring the acknowledgment automatically to everyone because you have acknowledged everyone. By your recognition, you awaken theirs and, through the Kingdom, answer the call of God. This is the natural response of every Son of God to the Voice of His Creator, because it is the voice for His creations and for his own extension.

Glory be to God in the highest, and to you because He has so willed it. Ask and it shall be given you, because it has already been given. Ask for light, and learn that you are light. If you want understanding and enlightenment, you will learn it because your will to learn it is your decision to listen to the Teacher who Knows of light and can, therefore, teach it to you.

There is no limit on your learning because there is no limit on your minds. There is no limit on His will to teach because He was created by unlimited Will in order to teach. Knowing His function perfectly, He wills to fulfill it perfectly because that is His joy and yours. To fulfill the Will of God perfectly is the only joy and peace that can be fully known because it is the only function that can be fully experienced. When this is accomplished, then, there is no other experience. But the wish for other experience will block this because God's Will cannot be forced upon you, being an experience of total willingness.

The Holy Spirit knows how to teach this, but your ego does not. That is why you need Him, and why God gave Him to you. Only His teaching will release your will to God's, uniting it with His power and glory, and establishing them as yours. You will share them as He shares them because this is the natural outcome of their being. The will of the Father and of the son are one together by their extension. Their extension is the result of their Oneness, holding their unity by extending their joint will.

This is perfect creation by the perfectly created in union with the Perfect Creator. The Father must give Fatherhood to His Sons because His Own Fatherhood must be extended outward. You, who belong in God, have the holy function of extending His Fatherhood by placing no limits upon it. Let the Holy Spirit teach you how to do this, for you will know what it means of God Himself.1

1. 1. ACIM Speaks podcast reading of this selection in the previous entry.

Hanging on to Deprivation

You are hampered in your progress by your demands to know what you do not know. This is actually a way of hanging on to deprivation. You cannot reasonably object to following instructions in a Course for knowing on the grounds that your do not know. The need for the Course is implicit in your objection. Knowledge is not the motivation for learning this Course. Peace is. As the prerequisite for knowledge, peace must be learned. This is only because those who are in conflict are not peaceful, and peace is the condition of knowledge because it is the condition of the Kingdom.

Knowledge will be restored when you meet its conditions. This is not a bargain made by God who made no bargains at all. It is merely the result of your misuse of His Laws on behalf of a will that was not His. Knowledge is His Will. If you are opposing His Will, how can you have knowledge? I have told you what knowledge offers you, but it is clear that you do not regard this as wholly desirable. If you did, you would hardly be willing to throw it away so readily when the ego asks for your allegiance.

The distraction of the ego seems to interfere with your learning, but it has no power to distract unless you give it the power. The ego's voice is an hallucination. You cannot expect the ego to say, "I am not real." Hallucinations are inaccurate perceptions of reality. But you are not asked to dispel them alone. You are merely asked to evaluate them in terms of their results to you. If you do not want them on the basis of loss of peace, they will be removed from your mind for you. Every response to the ego is a call to war, and war does deprive you of peace.

Yet, in this war, there is no opponent. This is the reinterpretation of reality which you must make to secure peace, and the only one you need ever make. Those whom you perceive as opponents are part of your peace which you are giving up by attacking them. How can you have what you give up? You share to have, but you do not give it up yourselves. When you give up peace, you are excluding yourself from it. This is a condition which is so alien to the Kingdom that you cannot understand the state which prevails within it.

Your past learning must have taught you the wrong things simply because it has not made you happy. On this basis alone, its value should be questioned. If learning aims at change, and that is always its purpose, are you satisfied with the changes yours has brought you? Dissatisfaction with the learning outcome must be a sign of learning failure because it means that you did not get what you wanted.

The curriculum of the Atonement is the opposite of the curriculum you have established for yourselves, but so is its outcome. If the outcome of yours has made you unhappy and, if you want a different outcome, a change in the curriculum is obviously necessary.

The Curriculum of the Atonement

The Curriculum of the Atonement from A Course in Miracles is a three part series. It represents the essence of the Course - how, as humans, we hurt ourselves, described in the first part, "Hanging on to Deprivation;" the change in direction and content, described in the second part, "A Change in Direction;" and "A Holy Encounter," the final part.

Knowledge is not the goal of the Course. Peace is.

Peace to you, my brothers and sisters.