A Course in Miracles Monk

Dear Monk: Why teach in person or via the internet?

Maybe because you felt like being a bloody fool? :)

I think this is an important question because it’s a common experience for Course students to want to teach the Course, often because they are placing form over content, or as a form of resistance to the Course and its content of love.

I have ACIM classes on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and write a blog etc., and as I spout all the metaphysics, not for a second am I teaching the course, per se.

Teaching the Course has nothing to do with teaching the Course. That would be an example of level confusion. Everything happens on the level of mind, so ‘teaching’ A Course in Miracles would be looking at your ego with Jesus. i.e. choosing your right mind / choosing Jesus as your teacher. When we choose the ego we are teaching specialness. So the only thing we can teach is which teacher we have chosen, and since there is no one else out there, we’re only ever teaching ourselves. But from within the experience of the world, teaching the Course would mean teaching there is an Alternative to the ego. We do this by demonstration, and the demonstration is simply that we live with Jesus in our minds.

Nothing else but that is ‘teaching the Course’.

If teaching is simply ‘teaching which teacher we’ve chosen’, and we’re always choosing Jesus or the ego, then we can’t not teach. We’re always teaching, but it has nothing to do with what our bodies do.

So it’s not what we do (body level), it’s who we do it with (mind level) that is important. Whatever we do, if we’ve first chosen to be in our right-mind, we’re teaching that everyone has a right mind, and the power to choose it, just like us.

Choosing Jesus as our teacher would have its expression in the world, but the expression would flow naturally (un-egoically) from the content of our choice. The form is the vehicle, the content is the message. That’s why so many people get caught up in thinking the Course is the message. The Course is the message (form) which points to the Message (love).

After choosing to identify with the love in your mind, you may appear to do any number of things in the world, but whatever you were doing, even if it was ‘teaching the course’, you wouldn’t REALLY be teaching the course/mowing a lawn/being an accountant, you’d be teaching a choice.

Nor from this vantage would you be compelled (being compelled would suggest there is a problem that needs fixing) to do any particular thing in the world, recognizing you’ve already done the only important thing. You might seem to teach the Course like Ken Wapnick does, but it would only be as an effortless expression of your right mind, which means you wouldn’t be teaching, the teaching would be done through you. You’d feel no sense of urgency, nor specialness, nor sense of import. Others might experience that in regards to you, but that would only be their own projection. Eventually they’d get that what was really important was that they make the same choice in their mind.

The Course never tells us not to do things in this world, it simply teaches us not to do things in this world expecting it will heal our mind. Jesus is only concerned with what we are choosing in our mind, but that choice will be reflected in our behavior. So you’d post if you felt like it, and not post if you didn’t, and if you did post, you wouldn’t make a big deal out of it. And if you didn’t post, you wouldn’t make a big deal out of that, because you’d know where the big deal really is: the choice for love or fear in your mind.

“To post or not to post?” becomes, “To forgive or not to forgive?”. This is our only question. When we’re preoccupied with any other question, it is because we don’t want to ask the only important question, because we don’t want the answer. Yet…

People sometimes think that because someone is joined with Jesus (let’s use Ken Wapnick as an example) that whatever they’re doing is their mission. No, it’s just what they do. “Our mission” or our “special function” is the same as everyone else’s mission — to accept the atonement for ourselves through the humble daily practice of forgiveness.