A COURSE IN MIRACLES
STUDY GROUP

WITH RAJ

Okay. Tonight we’re not going to be reading from the Book once again and I invite everyone to re-read the transcript of the last meeting, the one on November 12^th (2012) dealing with the Obstacles to Peace. Another week of review will be good for everyone.

So before we begin tonight, let’s all take a few moments to be quiet together.

[Quiet time]

Good evening. And welcome to everyone who’s joining us on the Internet.

Now when you dare to become quiet, to go within and engage in the two-step, by giving your attention to the Father, abandoning your own best thinking and judgments, you have only one thing to cope with. And that is, whatever resistance you bring to letting the Father’s Love register with you.

So the only arguments you’re going to run into against the experience of it are going to be yours. There won’t be a hundred-thousand different opinions arguing against your letting yourself have that experience. Just one—yours. That makes it relatively easy to get past the resistance because you, in so many words, can just tell yourself to “shut-up!” and mean it and abandon the arguments and listen.

But now, let’s say you have the experience of the Father’s Love and in the experience you have learned something about your Brother, about the fact that your Brother is Loved, and loveable and deserving of love just as you are, without qualification. And in that insight, in that new awareness of your Brother that isn’t a thinking process but is an experiential thing, you will behave differently toward your Brother or your Sister—your fellowman or the object of your affection, the part of Creation you’re giving your attention to, and perhaps the one who is blessed by your clarity is unable to accept it, is unable to conceive of it as real, reasonable, something deserved. And that one refuses to accept the gift of awareness of the truth about him that you embrace him with, and as a result, continues to suffer from his limited self-perceptions.

Now what’s happened here? Unlike when you’ve gone into the holy instant, and asked of the Father, “What is the truth here?” where only your arguments against the truth can block the experience of the Father’s extension of It to you, you’re now dealing with someone else—someone else who has arguments against the truth. And that one is not you and therefore, you do not have your hand on the switch that can turn off that argument as you do within yourself. And so it seems to get more complex.

Now the other thing is, that in your looking at your Brother initially with the awareness of his perfection, of his loveableness and the fact that he is uninterruptedly and wholly loved in every moment, you can begin to feel thwarted in your extension of the acknowledgement of the truth about your Brother. And suddenly, an opinion of yours about your Brother comes into play.

And so, in relationship with your fellowman, whom you desire to bless rather than harm, you find that there’s you with your clarity and then there’s your Brother with his ego perception of himself and now you with your ego-perception of him, even more complex. And the result is that you become frustrated by being thwarted in this divine activity which you very much care to be involved in and which you very much care to have your fellowman be blessed by. Because you know it’s part and parcel of Waking up, of everyone Waking up from the dream.

And now any range of emotions can come into play in you: frustration, sadness, grief, impatience. You can feel obligated to find a way to cause your Brother to see the truth and be free of the limitations that he thinks he deserves and that he thinks are real and which you have become aware are not because you have had this glimpse of the fact that you are Loved and that your Brother or Sister is likewise Loved.

Now you have feelings going on that aren’t part of the holy instant. Why? Because you’ve abandoned the holy instant yourself, in your desire to care for your Brother. And in meeting rejection or resistance to it, you shift into reaction instead of doing what gave you the experience of God’s Love in the first place, which revealed to you the truth about your Brother that you hadn’t seen about your Brother before and which your Brother still isn’t seeing.

Now if you allow yourself to slip out of that, well, let’s say, out of the holiness of the holy instant, you will begin to take responsibility for what happens and you will begin to feel that you must use force or coercion or some effort to convince your Brother that he is suffering falsely. And of course, now as I said, you’re completely out of the holy instant. Your Brother is likely to feel coerced because in fact you are not expressing the spontaneous flow of realization that comes with the experience of the Father’s Love.

So there’s an important point to remember here, let’s say, an easy way to back off from the frustration that comes from being met by resistance to the clarity of your vision that you have about your Brother or Sister. You know, you’re always using a measuring stick of some form. And a measuring tape or measuring stick is something that you lay upon or around that which you are measuring. Now suddenly when you abandon the holy instant in frustration with your awareness that your Brother isn’t getting healed of that which he deserves to be free of, you’ve started using a different measuring stick. It’s the measuring stick of the ego. It’s the measuring stick of human opinions. It’s the measuring stick of biased conclusions that you have come to about your Brother from, we’ll say, experience with your Brother and an effort to characterize him in your mind based upon his behavior.

Now there is a measuring stick that is the only true measuring stick. And that’s the focus of my attention tonight with you. The measuring stick is embodied in a statement, which I am going to paraphrase. And the statement is this:

“The starting point is that God—Spirit—is All in All and there is no other might nor mind.”

That is the foundation, the context in which you look into the holy instant in order to learn of the Father about your Brother, about yourself, about Creation, about your world. When you have been infilled with the experience with the Father’s Love which has transformed your sense of yourself out of the awful perceptions that you have had into the only perception you can have, when you realize that because you are experiencing God’s Love you are worthy of It, you are deserving of It even though you seem not to have gone through any steps of redemption yet. That is a profound experience.

Now, when you look at your Brother from within that experience, you are laying upon or embracing your Brother from that context, from that experience of being Loved. You are in so many words, measuring your Brother from the starting point which is that God—Spirit—is All in All and there is no other might nor mind.

That’s why your Vision, given to you by the Father is transformational. But just because it’s transformational, doesn’t mean that your Brother or Sister is necessarily going to hear It or recognize It or embrace It. Understand that, so you’re not surprised, not disappointed, not frustrated and you’re not caused to forget to continue doing what brought you the experience of being Loved, in other words, engaging in the two-step: “Father, what is the truth here?”

When you find yourself feeling frustrated because you are so impatient for your Brother to be in the experience of joy, you’ve got to remind yourself that the frustration is because you have abandoned the proper measuring stick—you’ve abandoned, stepped away from the starting point as though there’s some other point to start from.

The starting point is that God . . . the starting point is God. The starting point is not your Brother or his resistance or his bad behavior that is resulting from his very limited and negative self-perceptions. That is not the starting point. But if you shift and let that become the starting point for you, you will be joining him in his ignorance and abandoning the only thing that will transform.

And so, when this happens even if you are disgruntled and disappointed and feeling powerless, you must go back to the starting point. Remind yourself: the starting point is that God is All in All . . . that God—Spirit—is All in All and there is no other might nor mind.

Now once again, if you’re disgruntled and bothered, that statement is just going to be a string of words. It’s not going to be the experience you had of the fact that you are Loved by the Father. But in using that string of words, you break or interrupt the attraction you have let take you over to the bad behavior or the unfairness of the situation for your Brother that you know he doesn’t have to go through. And it will bring you back to a point of attentiveness—that attentiveness which is part of the holy instant or the practice of the two-step. Your giving your attention to the Father wanting to know, “Father, what is the truth here?” And you can bet your bottom dollar that the truth there is going to be inseparable from the starting point—the starting point of all Being, not just the starting point of your paying attention, that God—Spirit—is All in All and there is no other might nor mind.

As you relax into that because you’ve abandoned using your Brother or his behavior as your starting point, your peace will return. Your stability will settle in. And you will feel once again the Father’s Love, and you will then immediately know the truth about your Brother.

Now we’re back where we started before you got off the track. Now while your Brother continues to not believe the truth about him, you must continue to give your attention to the Father: “Father, what is the truth here? Father, what needs to be known, what needs to be done to uncover the blockage to his realization to his experiencing the influx of the awareness that he’s Loved?”

This is important.

You engage in the two-step. You practice the holy instant. You experience the blessing of it. You find yourself moved into the arena where God’s laws prevail and everything isn’t suddenly perfect. That doesn’t make any difference because it’s your task to stay on target! It’s your task not to abandon the holy instant. It’s your task not to shift your attention. When you know that, it will be easier to keep your attention there instead of becoming preoccupied by the stupid resistance of your Brother or Sister. You see?

Now you cannot do this with any preconception as to what is appropriate.

I will tell you this: it is not wise—it’s never wise—to give an answer to a question that hasn’t been asked. When a question is actually asked, there is already a readiness to accept or hear the answer. Therefore, surprising as it might seem, there are times when your Brother is suffering and you see the ridiculousness of it—the complete lack of necessity for it.

There are times when this happens that it is not appropriate for you to do anything . . . that it is appropriate for your Brother to be uncomfortable with his limited sense of what the truth is about himself, so that at the level of feeling, the question that needs to be asked can take form . . . so that he can arrive at the point where for his reasons he says, “I don’t want to have this experience any longer. I refuse to justify having this experience. I will abandon my arguments in favor of being limited and being in pain. How do I have that experience of letting go? How do I have the experience of freedom from pain?” Now the question has been asked and the readiness for the answer is present.

You must remember that although it’s hard to see about your Brother, you recognize that this is true about you. And the simple fact is that there have been things that were untrue about you that you suffered from only because you refused to let go of the justifications for it. You were getting a payoff for it. And something had to happen in the withinness of you that no one else could accomplish, whereby you were ready to stop hurting yourself, where you were ready to let a fuller experience of your divinity or at least a better life into your experience, maybe not fully expecting that it would come as a realization of the Presence of God Loving you and transforming your sense of yourself. You see?

Now I’ve told you this. And you can see that yes, this has been true about you and so therefore, it’s very likely to be true about someone else and therefore, you can fully expect to get that kind of an answer. And that is the exact opposite of what I’m saying! What I’m saying is that you must go back to the measuring stick. You must bring your attention back on target when you have become frustrated because the extension of your Vision and your love wasn’t received and reassume your position at the starting point.

Let’s understand something about the holy instant. It’s not a temporary experience of an instant. It’s not supposed to be ten or twenty holy instants experienced during a day, or ten thousands experienced over a year. The holy instant is describing you in a moment of defenselessness in which the experience of truth is revealed to you by the Holy Spirit—that which is nothing more than your right Mind—that Whose purpose is to reveal the Father’s Perspective to you because that’s your perception of Birthright, we’ll say. It [snaps fingers] occurs in an instant, but it doesn’t disappear in an instant. And you don’t have to abandon it. It’s supposed to be something that [snaps fingers] occurs in an instant and remains permanently your vantage point of choice. The starting point has to be your vantage point of choice because by it you will measure everything and as a result by it, you will experience everything truly.

And so as you experience an instant here and an instant there and an instant the next day, remember, it’s not supposed to stop. And the point is for you to remember to choose for the holy instant the moment it begins to stop, so it’s refreshed until it’s refreshed so frequently that it becomes a constant in your life, because you’re not abandoning it any more.

When you want to know the truth about your Brother you may not be confronted with a smooth path because the truth about your Brother is going to call for correction of things and sometimes those things are held onto ever so tightly. And so, if you don’t want to get frustrated and you don’t want to end up giving up, then you’ve got to remember to get right back into the holy instant where your attention is not on your Brother or his characteristics or his bad habits or his bad behavior and give your attention to God so that God and what God is revealing to you become the measure you apply to your Brother. You see?

“Oh well, I didn’t think it was going to be that much hard work?” You know what? It’s not your Brother that’s the hard work, it’s you that’s the hard work because you’re saying, “I would rather not stay in the holy instant all the time, that’s too much work. I would rather not stay in the place where I’m consistently experiencing the clarity that will meet the need, even if the clarity is that you need to be silent for a space of time that allows the discomfort caused by the resistance to create the inner circumstances whereby the elements of the essential question can take form . . . the question that the sufferer has, which because it is his question he will listen for the answer to.

It isn’t so much that you want results from the holy instant. It’s that you want to learn to be in the place where there is a constancy of the Spirit of God in you, a constancy of the Love of God whereby you are Loved and with which it is your Birthright to be Loving your Brother—an uninterrupted stability that under-girds your eternal holiness.

The shift, you could say, into eternity occurs from the instant you’re in by allowing yourself to be in it and not abandoning the starting point . . . no matter what!

This is the good news. This is the practical news. This is what constitutes actual change in you as a result of the initial experience of being Loved by the Father. The Gift is extended, not by becoming preoccupied with your Brother and giving him the Gift, but staying with the Father and the Gift He’s giving you. Because when you do that, it flows from you at the Father’s Will, not yours. And it feels so much better for it not to be your work—your responsibility carried out well. It feels so much better for healing and balance to be present because they’re the nature of Being, not some personal accomplishment of yours, because the nature of Being is all encompassing, unchallengable. That’s why it’s eternal.

So last week we talked about the fact that you’re Loved. And then part two was that your Brother, like you is Loved in exactly the same way. And in part three tonight is, that in engaging in the holy instant and feeling Loved by the Father you cannot help but extend your new clarified perception of yourself to your Brother. And voila! [snaps fingers] suddenly we have relationship . . . right? It’s not just you in the privacy of your little mind. We have relationship and there are new dynamics. And it’s very easy for the old dynamics, the ignorant dynamics of relationships to suddenly creep in.

And so part three is to remember to go back to the starting point, one could say, go back to the practice of the holy instant. But more than that, it’s going back to the starting point that is: that God—Spirit—is All in All and there is no other might nor mind. That as the foundation of everything that follows in the holy instant will always bring out the ultimate and will never aggravate the illusion or magnify it.

The three lessons of Love.

I love you all and I look forward to being with you next time.