I’m going to ask a question. After all of the gatherings we’ve had, after all of the Course in Miracles Study Groups . . . do you believe in healing? Do you believe in Healing?
Well, what do I mean by healing? I mean the return of a situation or a condition to its spiritual original – its original divine status.
Healing isn’t just having a better attitude while lack or injury or illness still seems to be present, even though it’s in a benign form that isn’t really threatening but does represent an incapacity on you or an environment that doesn’t allow it to function naturally and normally. In other words, healing is redemption in all respects. Not just emotional or mental, but in what you would call tangible, physical terms.
Do you believe in healing? Do you believe in Redemption where injury is no longer present or observable and there is nothing to indicate or infer that there ever was an injury or an illness – a physical malfunction? Healing is the eradication of that malfunction so that any thorough physical examination will show no evidence of abnormality of any sort.
Now, healing does apply to situations as well. You get word unexpectedly that you’re going to be evicted from your apartment or you get word that the company is cutting back and you’re going to be laid off. You weren’t in the best situation before you heard the news and you have a family. My God, you have a problem!
Now what is a problem? A problem is a situation that you don’t have an answer to. A problem is an assertion of lack that will be quite affective in your life that you do not have an answer for. It’s the not having the answer that constitutes the problem . . . not the circumstance. And that’s important.
When something comes up in your experience of this sort, perhaps also it’s a notification that you have an incurable disease that won’t kill you but will debilitate you . . . or maybe it’s a terminal disease and there’s no cure for it. Again, you’re confronted with a situation that you have no answer for and you’ve been told that there is no answer for. Meets the definition of a problem. And under those circumstances fear sets in.
Now fear is itself debilitating. It causes one to become dysfunctional, even non-functional. It finds its engine, if you will, in your belief that nothing can be done. And it becomes so distressing that you become obsessed with fear. It gets more and more of your attention. And it is more and more upsetting, and as a result you are in no mental shape to hear the answer – the redemptive corrective answer that brings the situation or the condition back into its original divine stature.
Now we’ve been talking for a l-o-n-g time about the holy instant and that it’s practice is one of doing the two-step. Which means, as you know, shutting up! Shutting up what? Shutting up your thinking. Shutting up the fear. And in the silence, asking, “What is the answer here?”
Now what needs to be better understood is this: Fear has nothing to do with the problem or the solution. It’s all about itself!
Again: Fear has nothing to do with the problem or the solution. It’s all and only about itself!
That’s why, as you engage fear by choosing to activate it because you don’t have an answer and you don’t think one is available, you, as it were, put yourself into a closed circuit – a circular circuit – which is repetitive and magnifies itself through its repetition. It distracts you actually, from the situation that you have defined as a problem. You become preoccupied entirely with the experience of fear. And because in its obsessive form, it suggests that the only solution is to mount a great defense, you become self-centered – not problem-centered, or solution-centered – you become self-centered, self-protective, which is arrogance. And then you become angry, which is self-righteousness.
And then when you hear me say the answer is the holy instant and that you need to shut up and ask of the Father, “What is the truth here?” you, because of your preoccupation with fear, ask the question, “What is the truth here?” through the lens of fear. And so when you ask, “What is the truth here about my being laid off?” you think you’re going to hear that you’re being laid off because you were lazy or because you were misunderstood, or for some illegitimate reason which you can do nothing about. You see? You, through the lens of fear believe that the truth is going to convict you and leave you dangling there in the problem.
And that is a misunderstanding. And that is what I am meaning to clarify tonight. Because fear has nothing to do with the problem or the solution. You can abandon it, except that’s not easy because you are obsessed by it. Nevertheless, I’m telling you tonight and you had best write it down so you can remember it:
Fear has nothing to do with the problem or the solution.
Therefore, to abandon fear is not irresponsible, it is not dangerous and it will not put you in the presence of threat of any kind. Because in the absence of this fear that seems so all important to you, you will have peace. And in peace, you can reach for the answer that is Redemptive because Redemptive is healing. Redemptive is the bringing of the situation back into its divine original state.
When you’re caught up in fear, when you’re obsessed by it, it’s almost impossible for you to listen to the words, “God Loves you” or the words, “You are the direct and full expression of God from whom God has withheld nothing of what He is in your creation. It’s hard to hear that. Because your fear is that you are irreparably damaged and it’s uncorrectable and you’re in the problem because of some innate flaw in you.
That’s what it boils down to. It boils down to a conviction of your incompetence or that you deserve the problem!
I’ve heard many students of the Course say when another student is having a problem: “I wonder why God is giving you this lesson – I wonder why God is giving you this problem – there must be some learning in it. And in this, the problem becomes legitimized when it is nothing but an illusion believed to be real that hasn’t been challenged yet!
Now as I said, the problem is a problem because you don’t have the answer.
When you abandon the practice of fear, even though you think you’ve been overcome by it from some external source, when you abandon the practice of fear, you are in a position to step into the holy instant – to step into the Void . . . to move into the pregnant silence where the unknown can become Known. And here you are at another juncture where the remnants of fear can suggest to you that you have trouble hearing Guidance or that for one reason or another, it is not likely that you’re going to be able to hear the Voice for truth or God.
This is where you have to remember there is a God, even though you’re experiencing doubt of one sort or another. It’s essential because Redemption is inevitable. Redemption, the experience of correction — a return to the spiritual original – is, I’m going to say, ordained, but the only reason it’s ordained or inevitable, is because God Being All, never stopped being God Being All. And that fact is going to have to surface. It’s inevitable that the Allness of God will surface as Something that has never changed.
Therefore, when you practice the holy instant and you ask, “What is the truth here?” you are employing faith, you are investing faith in the Father, in the Holy Spirit, in your Guide, in me that the answer that redeems will be made clear to you, even though you don’t know what it is. That is the whole point. The point of the holy instant is to return you to what you don’t think you know but which you do Know because the Father placed it in you and is eternally placing it in you by being You in every moment . . . as what? . . you in your own right with your own personal capabilities? No, as Himself expressing.
Are you getting the point? Here is the point again: In spite of fear, in spite of distress, abandon it. As unreasonable as that seems – at the moment you’re employing it – abandon it, because I’ve told you tonight and repeatedly in other ways in the past, that the practice of the holy instant is the means to remember God by caring about your Brother or caring about some part of the Kingdom of Heaven that you’re presently calling a physical universe, and desiring to Know God’s truth about that.
You are inviting what you have forgotten to be remembered, to present itself again, as it were, to you so that you might see that it’s already incorporated in you and it never left you and your capacity to see the Kingdom of Heaven where a miserable physical universe seems to be going on.
The holy instant is, and the practice of the two-step is, a matter of leaning into the unknown on purpose – letting yourself not know. Not requiring that you know before you lean into it, before you lean into the Father, before you lean into your right Mind. It is a practice of leaning into the unknown so that the unknown can become Known to you. It’s called Revelation. It’s inevitable. It’s the way Waking up works. It is how the holy instant functions. You see?
To say you have a problem because you have a situation that you don’t have the answer to, is to be stuck in a total lack of reason, a simple case of insanity, if you will. If there is a situation calling for correction, correction is available. If there is a situation that does not look like the Kingdom of Heaven or the Perfection of God Being, then there is available that which corrects it, even though you don’t know what it is. And you will not know what the redemptive answer is until you let yourself not know what the answer is, which means abandoning any confidences you have in yourself to be able to come up with the answer through the excellent use of reasoning and logic and your best use of your spiritual learning in the past.
You see, until you abandon self-confidence you can’t really, with humility, turn to God and ask Him to reveal the truth to you – to reveal the answer that is the answer, to make the unknown Known to you. And yet that is what needs to happen. You see?
You no longer need to labor under the misunderstanding of what the question means, “What is the truth here?” You no longer need to labor under the idea that it is somehow going to convict you. “Oh, it’s karma!” Three lifetimes ago, a hundred lifetimes ago you did such-and-such and now it has returned to haunt you. You see?
All that does is legitimize and consolidate the factors that keep you ignorant, stuck, miserable. It’s not the answer . . . that’s not the unknown having been made Known.
To ask to know, “What is the truth here?” is to be a joyous question, a joyous process, because you can anticipate learning something exceptional, something beyond anything that you would imagine from your independent standpoint.
You have to have faith in two things: One is that there is an answer that redeems, and the second part is that the answer will be made known to you, if you but humbly ask to know what it is. And then listen without biasing the answer with any preconceptions or favorite theories that you have.
Faith is the big word that underlies the efficacy of the holy instant because it requires you to abandon faith in yourself – this miserable puny little organism that sins, suffers and dies – and placing your faith in something that you can’t have proof of the existence of until you in your humility reach out to it and expect a response. In the response you have the proof. You see?
It’s very important . . . it’s very important . . . answers redeem.
Fear has nothing to do with the problem or the solution – it’s all about itself. Abandon it and the situation that you were calling a problem, that warranted the fear, will be a situation calling for an answer that does exist, that you can count on the existence of, so that you may, in your peace, without fear, shut-up and ask to know, “Father, reveal to me what the redemptive answer is here? Reveal to me the good news that has nothing to do with the problem as I was perceiving it and all of the imaginative justifications that I was able to come up with for having the problem and therefore condemning me to suffering.” You see?
The practice of the two-step is guaranteed to work. But you will not dare to let the answer in until you are willing to believe that the answer will not convict you but release you. And it will release you by revealing God in every aspect of the situation in God’s Perfection, which will mean the disappearance of injury and the evidence of injury. It will be the permanent remission of a terminal disease or a not so terminal disease.
It will be the returning to the spiritual original everything about you, including your awareness that you are unequivocally worthy of God’s Love, which means His sharing with you His answer that transforms your mind as well as your ability to see the tangible evidence of the truth of what God is Being as a redeemed world that will be obvious to you as the Kingdom of Heaven.
But you must dare to believe in healing to begin with. And you must dare to silence your fear. And you must dare to lean into the unknown with a confidence that what was unknown that redeems the situation will be made clear to you, revealed to you and the joy of it. The joy of it will inspire you in every other situation where the holy instant needs to be practiced, presents itself. And you will not get hooked by fear, which is all and only about itself. And you will move, I will say, from glory unto glory until the transformation is complete in you. And fear and ultimate self-righteousness simply no longer occur.
This is the good news!
Between now and the next time we get together I want all of you to dare to practice leaning into the unknown. Expecting the unknown to reveal itself to you as the Known, as redemption not conviction. And lean into it constantly all day long every day you are not seeing the Kingdom of Heaven. And so the redemption of your vision is available for you to access constantly, as an adventure, if you will. You see?
This should lighten your load and cause you to be able to cast off illusions that burden you falsely. I’m very grateful to be able to spend this time with you and to share these things with you because your practice of them will Awaken you, so that we may enjoy our Brotherhood without illusions.
I love you all and I look forward to being with you next time.
A Course In Miracles (reference pages)
Raj did not read from the Course tonight
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A Course in Miracles Study Group with Raj, September 1st 2013
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TRANSCRIPT & AUDIO 09-01-2013
General Discussion -> Transcripts & Audio 2013-2014
