The Alchemy of Practicing ACIM

            Your spiritual path is an expression, but you probably experience it as for something—you want a different experience. You want peace. And a new experience comes not from ideas, but from practice that invites and extends the new experience.

There are a lot of ideas in A Course in Miracles that are startling, maybe frightening, and often seem impossible when you first learn them. How can the world you see not be real? How could you ever come to understand that you are not a body? How can you see the real world when ego’s world is right before your eyes? The alchemy of practice is that it transforms ideas into experience. For example, I did not come to understand that I am mind by going around saying, “I am not a body” or even “I am mind.” The awareness that I am mind seeped in over time as I watched my mind, as I watched how my thoughts and judgments made the world I saw. I realized one day that I had shifted and now understood I am a mind.

I did not come to see the world is an illusion by going around looking at the world saying, “This is an illusion.” Rather, I grew my awareness of Truth (Spirit) within, and from Truth what is not real is apparent. And perceiving the real world is not something I made happen, but once I saw it, I kept it in my awareness by bringing my mind back to it.

 

“This is not a course in the play of ideas, but in their practical application.” (T-11.VIII.5)

 

It does not matter how well you feel you understand the Course, how well you can quote it, how well you know on which page it says what. Peace will not come from understanding words on a page but from applying the suggested practice. The Course’s primary practice for transforming your experience from conflict to peace is forgiveness, which in the Course means coming to see that only God is real, so nothing real is occurring in your perception that you are a person in a body in a world. And it has three tools for this: the holy instant, the Holy Spirit, and the holy relationship.

The holy instant is any moment you take out of time to remember God (Reality beyond consciousness) is here, now. You can do this in a longer, formal meditation but also in brief moments throughout the day. This isn’t an intellectual gimmick. You are inviting an experience; you are remembering experiences you had in the past. When you practice this, it keeps God closer to your conscious awareness so that when you need to turn to God, It is close by.

As a student of the Course, you are meant to develop a relationship with God’s Spirit in your consciousness so It can be your Teacher and Guide. You are encouraged to use your experiences of the world as a classroom in which you learn of the Holy Spirit, transforming your life from an end in itself to the means to being aware of the Holy Spirit. Over time, you become aware that the Holy Spirit, not ego, is what is real in your consciousness, so only It could be the true “I” here.

On the surface, parts of the Course can read like hippy-dippy-do-kumbaya-let’s-all-just-looove-one-another with its use of terms like Sons of God and suggestions of how to treat each other. But the practice in your relationships is to take responsibility for your projections onto others and to see the Christ in you in others. And if this occurs, the concept of other is wiped out and you see that there is only One here and the multiplicity of others that you see is a false appearance.

Beyond ego, there is Something Else in your mind that is of God and these practices are how you become aware of It and of God. The answers to the questions in the first paragraph will not come through intellectual reasoning, but through practices that invite experiences that show you the Truth. And once you have those experiences, practice becomes the way you remember them, you extend them in your awareness.

A fine example of the alchemy of practice that the Course brings about has to do with nonduality. I see the question “Is A Course in Miracles a nondual teaching?” bandied about on social media now and again. You could find passages in the Course for yes and passages for no. But no matter how the Course reads, truly practicing it leads to “yes”, because the practice of forgiveness—as written above—brings you back again and again to only God is real, wiping out all appearances otherwise.

 

>>>> 

If you have a question the answer to which you feel may be helpful to others, send it to Liz@acimmentor.com and indicate that you want it answered in this newsletter/blog.