A Course in Miracles Monk

Welcome to the Scriptorium!

Below, under their workshop title, is the entire compilation of “monk notes” I have posted from the Ken Wapnick FACIM workshops I have attended. They are ordered by date with the most recent at the top.

Please note: These notes are not word for word and therefore might contain errors. All errors mine. ~ ACIM Monk

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Leading Lives of Quiet Desperation, July 12-14, 2009

• The way you get back to the mind is through the whole idea of purpose. Once I start thinking about purpose that makes me mindful. Who is the you who is thinking about purpose? It’s not your body. It’s always your mind that is aware of purpose.

• If you get a headache, a flat tire, cancer, or win the lottery, it can serve one of two purposes: the ego’s purpose of keeping me as a body (attacked), or the Holy Spirit’s purpose of returning me to the mind. Almost always the first purpose is ego.

• If I’m thinking about the purpose of a flat tire, cancer, or winning the lottery, I’m already in the mind, and that will weaken my identification with the body. This is remarkably freeing, and will give you a meaning in your life that will be permanent until you awaken from the dream.

• Realize everything, all day, serves one of two purposes. I shift the focus of my attention from the outside, to the purpose the outside serves.

• Why do I want the anxiety, anger, specialness, attention? Because I’m afraid of love.

• Nothing in the dream matters, only the purpose it serves. That’s all you need to know. This practice will strengthen your identity with your mind. The only question is, What is it for?

• The purpose of being a student of this course is to awaken from the dream, and nothing else.

• Ask yourself: Why am I sitting here tired, anxious, bored? Why am I sitting here at all? Why am I going to lunch? You’re not having lunch because you’re hungry. You’re hungry (or bored, or anxious, or tired) only to learn one of two lessons: either God’s Son is guilty or guiltless. That’s why I do everything. This simplifies everything;  it cuts through the multitudinous forms of the dream.

• “What is it for?” can have one of two answers. 1) To keep me rooted in the dream, or 2) to awaken from the dream.

• Anything that makes the body real serves the ego’s purpose.

• Anything that looks at purpose, and makes the mind real, serves the Holy Spirit’s purpose.

• When I’m right-minded I do what my body needs, but it won’t take center stage.

• The ego’s purpose is to make this world SERIOUS.

• We make life very serious, death very serious. We take the destruction of a species very serious. (Everything is already extinct!) If the world of bodies is serious, then the thought system that made it is serious, which says sin is serious, which says separation is real, which says I’m real. That’s the purpose of seriousness… to thumb our nose at God, and say I exist and it is serious.

• If you understand purpose then you will understand why you get hot and bothered, happy, excited etc. It’s never for the reason we think. It’s to reinforce that we exist.

• Practice: The only thing we should ever think about is: Am I taking this seriously or not? Serious = something has the power to affect me with happiness or sadness.

• The other purpose is gentle laughter. Laughter = how silly to believe anything can affect the peace of God in my mind.

• Re-examine why you are going to lunch. The purpose of lunch or the purpose of a cup (lesson 7) is the purpose of the universe.

• The right-minded purpose of everything is to learn nothing has power over me. Nothing has the power to take the peace of God from me.

• Practice: Do I take a shower with a smile or seriously? Visit the doctor with a smile or seriously?

• People get off-base with the smile. It’s not smiling at form. It’s the smile in the mind that says “I know I’m not a body.” The first kind of smile is cruel.

• The practice doesn’t always seem to work because it’s a long process (because we’re so attached to our specialness).

• It really takes a radical vigilance to always remember I’m never upset for the reason I think.

• Practice: Just remind yourself of this (lesson #5) all the time even if it seems like its only rote or intellectual. It’s still helpful because there must be something in me that wants this; why else would I be reminding myself of it?

• It really takes a LOT of work. It’s a lifetime-practice of mind-training. If you have to begin by saying it without really believing it, or experiencing it, it’s still helpful because it says I’m a mind and not a body (even if you’re not aware of it).

• Practice: Go through the day seeing how you take things seriously, and realize how that serves the ego’s purpose.

• There’s nothing in the wrong mind to take seriously. There’s nothing there. We think there’s something there.

• Practice: Watch your ego in action, and bring it to the Holy Spirit’s song: Nothing Happened. Not one note in Heaven’s Song was missed.

• The Course is probably the most demanding thing you could ever read. We’re really asked to give up everything. On this side of the bridge it doesn’t feel like it’s nothing. It is experienced as painful. It is very difficult. To learn not to take our body/world seriously is very difficult. Every step along the way is met with resistance. All pain and suffering in this world comes from resistance — don’t let anyone tell you anything differently. We’re resistant to choosing the Holy Spirit’s truth. The way to minimize pain is to get to the mind as quickly as possible (which is what we’re resistant to… so at least know why you’re resistant, and don’t call it by any other name).

• (Monk note: OK, one non-purpose note.) These aren’t Jesus’ words. That’s like Santa Claus. Jesus doesn’t speak words. He’s love. We’re the ones who translate the love into form.

• The journey from mindlessness to mindfulness is through purpose.

• We all live lives of quiet desperation, it’s just that we’re often not aware of it. There is an inherent hopelessness and despair we all carry within us. A part of us knows this is not Home, but doesn’t know where Home is, and believes if we did find it, we wouldn’t be let back in.

• Even when you consciously feel despair, it never holds a candle to the despair in our mind.

• We spend our whole lives trying to make life work, but it will never work because all roads lead to death. It might sometimes work on the level of form, but that will never undo our desperation.

• The Holy Spirit needs us to know how miserable we are. He wants us to know how we lead lives of quiet desperation, are always distressed. You will never be motivated to learn this Course if you are not aware that the way you have chosen does not work.

• You can’t say all this is silly as a body. Don’t even try. You can only say it as a mind.

• If you’re not aware of the quiet desperation, you’re doomed to keep projecting it. You must feel the pain of continually choosing the ego and specialness.

• If you are not miserable, nothing will work. You won’t have the motivation to practice this Course. You will walk around thinking you are the embodiment of the peace of God.

• There is no way of changing anything if we think we are bodies in a world.

• Practice: The way out is to recognize it’s coming from choosing my ego, not from what is happening in the world, or what I am experiencing in the world.

• The part of us that is in pain is the part of us that doesn’t want to change.

• We’re not afraid of the horrifying content of the wrong mind, we’re afraid of the right mind. We’re afraid that if we went back to the mind we would leap into our Father’s arms and the world and our illusory self would disappear.

• How do you find joy in a joyless place? Not by trying to make it joyful, but by recognizing you are not there.

• Guilt has no power, it’s our decision for guilt that has power. When you recognize you put the guilt there, you recognize the guilt is not the problem.

• When we recognize the world holds nothing that we want, then we are ready to say there must be a better way.

• Nothing here will give us the peace of God.

• Realizing nothing here works is what motivates us to finally choose differently. As long as we think form works, or might work, we’ll be focused on the body and not the mind.

• The lesson is not that the world sucks, that nothing here works — the lesson is that the decision making power of the mind does work.

• Practice: We are too afraid of direct learning, so we use indirect learning; we use the world to get back to the mind.

• The world is an outside of picture of an inward condition, so I need the world to get me back to the mind, it’s the only way I can access the unconscious activity of the mind. Unconscious activity = decision making activity. This is the oly value of the world… to learn everything here is a projection of what’s going on in my unconscious mind. This changes everything. Now I have hope.

• There is no greater joy than truly knowing you are forgiven. Nothing here comes close, and nothing here will give us that.

• Practice: The way out of all suffering is to see the problem as it is (chose wrong teacher in the mind), not the way you set it up (problem in the world).

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The Unhealed Healer, July 11, 2009

• The unhealed healer makes the error real, thinks there is a problem, and then tries to do something about it. The correction: not bothering with sin at all, the forms at all — they’re not the problem, the problem is we’ve made sin real. The unhealed healer has not accepted within themselves that the sin is unreal, and therefore everything they do is contaminated with that belief. They will teach the ego thought system thinking, “I am being kind, wise and helpful.” I. I. I. You can only be kind as a right mind. A body can never be kind.

• What makes an unhealed healer an unhealed healer is that they don’t know what has to be changed is not the ego but the belief in the ego.

• Freud knew a bad thing when he saw it, he just didn’t know bad things don’t exist.

• How wise can we be to continue to try to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, a thought that doesn’t exist?

• Nothing here works because it comes from a thought that doesn’t work.

• A concern for people is hate. You don’t know that it is, you think you are being kind and considerate. Anytime you see another body as different from you, that’s separation.

• The unhealed healer thinks their wisdom heals, their brilliance heals, their creativity heals. Wrong. That is what attacks. A healed healer is one who no longer believes in nightmares of any kind.

• The only thing that heals is example. Wisdom, brilliance and creativity do not undo guilt. Example does.

• If you truly want to make a difference in the world, heal yourself. If you really want people to heal their belief in separation, show you no longer believe in it.

• You can only be a true healer when you recognize your mistake: namely, that you think there is someone out there to be healed. • A healed healer appreciates the power of the mind and chooses again.

• When Helen asked Jesus what she should say to someone, Jesus responded: “Don’t ask me what to say to this brother, ask me instead to see him through the eyes of peace and not judgment.” You ask Jesus to help you with your perception, not something external from you. The help you’re asking for is help to undo anything that interferes.

• An unhealed healer thinks there are separate interests: You have a problem, I don’t have that problem, I can help you with your problem. All seeming helping situation are to learn we are all the same.

• Practice: Right-minded use of our worldly situations (being a psychotherapist, scientist, plumber, ACIM teacher, parent) is that we use the same situation/form, we are faithful to the role, not because it’s important, but because it’s the classroom in which I will learn I am not guilty, that we’re all the same. Otherwise you will fall into specialness and importance. So fulfill your role, but see that we all share the same interest of healing our mind and returning Home. Simply monitor your own thoughts, your ego reactions. Do your worldly job, AND monitor your own reactions, and any feeling that does not reflect shared interests, then know you are sick, too, and need to ask for help. The Psychotherapy Pamphlet doesn’t deal with the patient, technique or psychotherapy. Healing occurs when the therapist forgets to judge the patient.

• You can’t teach this Course unless you are forgiving, kind and loving. You can teach the form, but not the content. It’s not the words that heal, it’s the example.

• Judgment = seeing separate interests. Non-judgment = seeing shared interests on the level of the mind.

• A healer does not heal, he lets healing be.

• Respect a person’s pain as they are experiencing it. Work with and help people on the level of pain and the level of their suffering, but in your mind know that the only pain is believing we are separate from our Source. Remember the pain is coming from their choice for the ego. But be careful you don’t fall into callousness, which is very easy to do. Teach them by your example that they could choose peace. It’s not verbal, and it’s not done with metaphysics.

• A healed healer is someone who is unaffected by the world.

• There is no difference between helper and the one being helped.

• The only way I can be truly helpful is to get my ego out of the way, then love will come in a form people can accept.

• When you make other people’s suffering real you are condmening them to being a body, and if you really love them you want to teach them that they have the power to choose peace, and you can’t do this as long as you share their dream.

—

The Neutral World, June 14-16, 2009

• In one sense, the world is decidedly not neutral: it was made as an attack on God, the body was made as a limitation on love, it’s a place where “starved and thirsty creatures come to die”.

• So why is the world neutral? It’s very important to understand this and its implications. Once made, the world becomes neutral because it can serve one of two purposes: 1) to see my life as a prison, or 2) a classroom in which I will learn the lessons that will help me awaken from the dream.

• Almost all Course students fall into the trap of New Age thinking. They get a flat tire and say, “My guilty thoughts attracted the nail”, instead of saying, “I could choose to see this flat tire with peace” or “With which teacher am I going to change this tire?” This makes your life extremely simple. I don’t have to figure out ANYTHING because it’s ALL irrelevant, and it’s irrelevant because at any given moment I can choose to look at the world with the ego or the Holy Spirit. That is the only thing that has meaning or relevancy. Nothing else. The idea of the Course is to get us to the choice-point/neutrality as quickly as possible. We want to shrink the time between choosing the ego and being aware of having chosen it. As we progress, this shrinks… instead of us having to play catch-up all the time. Even better: to realize you have a choice before you react. The more quickly you can see your choice, the more quickly you can let it go, and not be stuck with the effects and experiences of the ego.

• If you don’t see the world as neutral it’s very hard to get away from the idea that the world is bad, the body is bad, that certain body feelings are bad. What the body does is neutral; the problem is in the mind because purpose is in the mind, and the problem is purpose.

• The problem is not the circumstance that confronts me right now – it FEELS like it’s not neutral – but it IS. It’s neutral because I could choose to see it with one of two teachers, and this choice is not bound by the circumstance I’m facing.

• The tiny mad idea, and all its forms, is not the problem. The problem is the teacher I’m choosing to look at it with.

• To say the world is neutral is to say I have a choice, and that’s where neutrality and forgiveness and hope lies.

• The mistake of the law of attraction / treasure mapping: it’s based on 1) what the body is doing, not what the mind is doing (they use the word “mind” but they’re really talking about the brain), and 2) on the the idea that the person knows what they need. How do you know this job or a million dollars or a new relationship is good for you?

• The mind is not in the body; this is not holistic health.

• Everything is neutral: money, sex, food, nature, a concentration camp.

• Practice: If something shows up in my life, all I need to know is:

It’s my script
I chose to review it now
All scripts are the same, they’re neutral
I can review it with one of two teachers (and this is all that is important)

• Do you know what happens when we think Jesus helps us in the world? It reinforces mindlessness and keeps the decision for guilt permanent, and the guilt gets projected out. That’s why Christian history has been so bloody – because it’s based on judgment, and judgment leads to killing, and you think you’re doing it in Jesus’ name. If you really followed Jesus you would value all people… e.g. not just fetuses, but also the people who abort them.

• We think the world has value or we wouldn’t be here.

• Not understanding the world is neutral has led some Course students to get into awful mistakes.. e.g. where they allow themselves to be raped, die of cancer without treatment.

• The body is not born and does not die. The body is a lifeless piece of wood. It only feels what we programmed it to feel. I stick a pin into my finger and it bleeds because I programmed it to do that.

• The mind is not released by the body at death.

• We have the illusion that we’re choosing. When I have the experience of forgiving or being angry, my mind has taken the decision in the mind and translated it. I’m not going to make much progress in the journey as long as I think I’m the student / that Jesus is talking to me (a body).

• My mind can make my body hate, but that doesn’t make the body hateful. The body is nothing. It is neutral. It’s not good, bad, holy or unholy. It can be used to serve a holy or unholy purpose.

• Question: Can I influence my mind? Answer: How?? The mind influences you. You are the mind that wonders if you can influence the mind. What you do has no effect on the mind. There is no you. There is only mind.

• How can you possibly think the body forgives? How can you forgive someone else? There is no one else. But when I choose the teacher of forgiveness, and I still think I’m a body, I will experience myself as a body forgiving another body.

• Practice: You don’t have to make salvation happen. You don’t have to work at this by fighting against the ego. That makes the world real as you walk toward God, and causes a lot of strain. What you do is you wake up and let the day unfold and shift your attention to what your mind is doing, while remembering “I can see the world with the teacher of peace.”

• The problem is not the world but which teacher I look at the world with. If I look at it with Jesus, it becomes a vehicle that leads me beyond itself. I will do what normal people do, but peacefully. And I won’t ask, “Why did this happen, or that happen?” This will save a lot wasted energy, misery and heartache.

• There are no original thoughts, just old thoughts we think we’re thinking for the first time.

• You don’t have to feel the sense of separation from God directly, just work on the perception of separation you feel between yourself and other people, and that will take care of God.

• Practice: If you find out you have cancer you deal with it as a normal person would, you just do it without judgment, AND you do it without, “Why did this happen?” There is no way you can understand how one piece of the Atonement plan fits into a hologram that happened all at once. It is senseless to muse upon what cannot be understood. Once you ask “Why?”, you’re in the past. What difference does it make? The circumstance is here, so the question is, “Now what?” Namely, which teacher will I choose? To ask why you have cancer or a flat tire is equally silly. Yes, metaphysically you chose it, but now that it’s here the problem is taking it seriously.

• We forget we chose the right mind just as we forget we chose the ego. When we forget we’ve chosen the right mind, that’s when we say things like, “Look what Jesus did for me.”

• Stay out of business that is not yours, which is everything. This is humility. You think you’re the one who makes your family go around, everything go around, that you’re the God of your family, relationships etc.

• When you look at your ego without judgment you’re in your right mind. The more you do this the more you reinforce your identification with the right mind.

• Jesus is teaching us to associate pain with choosing the ego, and joy with choosing him. He does this simply by having us look at the effects of our choosing.

• The Course is not Christian; the language is Christian.

• QUESTION: Is the Course a Christian Vedanta? ANSWER: That’s what Bill called it. I think it’s a Freudian Vedanta.

• The Course says we have a teaching function. This has nothing to do with form. It does not mean standing up in front of people and talking, or writing. The function we all share is forgiveness. Our teaching function is to demonstrate that what Jesus is teaching is true. The way we demonstrate that he lives in us, that love lives in us, is through forgiveness. You demonstrate you are not of this world but you do it within the context of this world. You live, look, dress, and eat like everyone else – people accept love in a form they understand. If you’re too different then you’ll be seen as not relevant.

• When we choose love we would use the symbols of the world to express it. You go to a funeral, or a wake, and you say ‘I’m sorry for your loss,” and all the normal things. It’s not the symbols that comfort, it’s the love behind your use of the symbols.

• Every right-minded symbol is a correction for a wrong-minded symbol. So the symbol that “God is lonely and weeps for us” is a correction for the wrong-minded symbol that God is angry at us.

• Love doesn’t change because of what someone says or does in this dream; why should your love change? When you choose the miracle, then no matter what people do or say you don’t cut them off from you, you don’t judge them… then there’s no conflict and tension in your life.

• Everything in the world is neutral. It has no value, meaning, significance, importance or emotional charge. It but waits for you to give it meaning through the thought system you choose to identify with. Even the symbols of our phobias are nothing. They could just as easily be symbols of forgiveness, peace and healing.

• Every single problem, without exception, is healed the same way: return to the decision maker and choose the miracle.

• Anytime during the day in which you feel trapped in a prison house (because you feel you can’t escape the body / personality) then you need that interval where you ask for help and shift your attention from from the world to the mind.

• We’re all decision makers desperately trying to forget we’re decision makers.

• When we return to the mind we look at things differently. We realize whatever is there (interpretation) we put there.

• Many Course students have misinterpreted “the world is an illusion” into the idea that being involved in the world is bad. If Jesus uses all the symbols of the world, why shouldn’t we? Use them, just don’t make them real, which means: don’t give them the power to make you happy or sad.

• Practice:

QUESTION: I feel worthless and jealous. How do I deal with it?

ANSWER: What’s really helpful is to go within and say, “I wanted to feel this way. Even before I felt worthless, I wanted to feel this way, and I used the situation to feel the way I wanted to feel.” What you want to be able to do is say, “Yeah, I did this, and I wanted to feel this way, and it’s OK.” And you would want to realize why you did it. You would realize, “I am a different person than I was last year, and I am afraid of it (being without an ego), so I chose my ego. Therefore I needed an external reinforcement and chose worthlessness and jealousy.” Then just stop. Don’t fix it. If you want to fix the ego you’re saying there is an ego. If you want to fix the problem you’re saying there is a problem. And you’ll never get out of it that way. Just say, “This is what I wanted. I got afraid of love, and that’s OK.”

• Implications of a neutral world: It means nothing here has meaning or value, and any meaning it seems to have can only come from the mind. It means that anything that attracts or repulses you in the world can’t come from the world, it must come from the mind’s decision.

• If I don’t know I have a mind I can’t change my mind, and if I can’t change my mind my original and ongoing decision for the ego is upheld. The value of the world, then, is to monitor our feelings and projections, whether they are positive or negative.

• All great works of art must also be neutral. If you have an experience of beauty, or you are moved, it was because you made a decision to be in your right mind, and not knowing I am a mind, my mind translates the decision into form. The problem is when we think it’s the form we love; it’s the triumph of form over content. Instead of a means to get back to the love in your mind, it becomes an idol – a substitute for the true beauty of love that is within us. The right-minded value of anything is that it leads us back to the mind. If we don’t use it to get back to the mind it becomes just another special relationship.

• Everything of itself is meaningless because I have given it all the meaning it has for me.

• What is meaningful to the ego is differences.

• The world is a pictorial representation of our attack thoughts, so the pictorial representation is not the problem, it’s the attack thoughts.

• There is nothing holy or unholy about any form or behavior in this world. Even murder or rape are not unholy, it’s the thought system they come from.

• Whatever you push down (guilt) you push out (project).

• The problem is not what behavior is, but which thought system I have chosen. So the value of monitoring your thoughts is seeing which teacher you’ve chosen so you can correct a choice that has hurt you.

• When you are in your wrong mind you see yourself in a prison cell called a body and a penitentiary called the world.

• The world is neutral because everything comes from your mind.

• Regarding marriage: That person is not better than other people; that person is just a part of your script. If you are attracted to someone or something and you see it with the Holy Spirit then you can see it as part of your classroom. When you see it from the ego, you judge those who are different. We make choices, but the choices don’t have to be attacks.

• Move from the differences in the world to the sameness in our mind.

• What we forgive is our misperceptions that we are different. And there’s one core difference: sin and holiness, guilt and innocence. The core difference is you are the sinner and I am the sinned against.

• We’re at war with everyone here because we think we’re at war with God.

• The world is neutral because the mind is neutral, and the mind is neutral because it has choice. (Once it chooses it’s not neutral anymore. ) That’s where Jesus wants us to be all the time – to know that we could choose.

• Practice: to watch how you go throughout the day judging, whether it’s positive or negative. Our happiness does not depend on another person so it’s very helpful to see how quickly we give it away, and it’s my mind that has given it away. Watch how quickly you ascribe how you feel to your body. Just notice, without judgment, what you are doing, its purpose, and cost.

• A Course in Miracles is not a book; it’s an extension in form of the thought of Atonement in the mind.

• I think I am upset because the world has failed me.

• QUESTION: How can I remind myself I am a mind when circumstances are so compelling? ANSWER: It takes a lot of discipline, vigilance and work to recognize the circumstances are not the determiner of my peace. At first the practice is intellectual, but after awhile, if you do this with a reasonable amount of discipline, you will begin to see that the peace in your mind is unaffected by the highs and lows of the world.

• Everything in the world is trivial.

• The miracle solves every problem the same way: by taking us from the body to the mind.

• Once you understand the principle, you spend the rest of your life, day after day, practicing; seeing the problem as it is and not the way you’ve set it up.

• Practice: When you see your ego in action: “I became afraid of love again. Big deal. Tell me something I don’t know.”

• Practice: When you get excited about something don’t feel guilty; just remember that you’re making the mindless world into salvation again. When this happens, don’t judge, just look. Don’t fight or struggle against the ego.

• As you practice this Course you begin to break your identity with the body, and the body becomes holy because of its purpose.

• As you become more and more right-minded you feel less and less emotion. To the ego this is boring.

• Re: fears. Use everything in your body, and all your thoughts, to get you back to the mind, so that you can realize that what makes my body negative or positive in my experience is a decision in my mind.

—

Changeless Reality vs. the Changeable Illusion, June 13, 2009

• What made us who we are is change. Change gave us what we think of as life.

• If you don’t apply the Course, understanding it means absolutely nothing.

• Reality within the dream: we’re all the same. Illusion with the dream: we’re all different. Right-minded change = change from the ego (grievances) to the Holy Spirit (sameness). Wrong-minded change = changing from special hate relationships to special love relationships, and vice versa.

• You should place no value on your special relationships except to see them as classrooms that will teach what love really is.

• We WANT people to be like the people in our past who hurt us because it justifies everything we believe. That bodies can affect me is the mother of all lies. If bodies are unreal, how can they affect me, a mind?

• You cannot teach this Course unless you live it, and continue to grow in the living of it. You don’t have to be perfect, but living it and growing in the living of it is teaching it. You don’t teach with words, you use the words to teach the underlying content.

• Practical application of Course: I learn nothing outside of me can make me happy or sad. To our right mind this is freeing; to our wrong mind this is terrifying.

• You can live your whole life with just this one line: “I could see peace instead of this.” (Lesson 34) That’s the sum and substance of A Course in Miracles. This is true regardless of what’s going on in the world, your body, or my body, because they’re all equally outside of my mind.

• On the level of the body we are addicted to form (food, alcohol, drugs), but that’s a lie. We’re addicted to guilt. And as long as we’re addicted to guilt, nothing will change.

• If it changes, it is not worthy of your attention… except to return your attention to what IS worthy of your attention: namely, your mind’s potential to change to the changeless.

• The thought of guilt and forgiveness in the mind will never change. The ego never changes, the Holy Spirit never changes; the only change is the decision maker’s choice of thought systems. The only thing that changes is the mind that realizes it made a mistake.

• No matter our dreams of hate, the Love of God remains changeless.

• Don’t let other people’s ego behavior affect you. And if it does affect you, it’s because you wanted it to have an effect on you so you could justify your original change (belief you could separate from God), which means it will never change.

• The practice: To see how changeable we are, and how we attribute our changeable feelings to something external. That’s the lie. And we’ve made a secret vow to uphold the lie. We have special relationships to reinforce change. It’s a game, a vicious game. “Come to the sandbox. Let’s descend to the depths of childhood and throw sand in each others’ faces, build castles together, then destroy them and blame each other.” What we want to do is stand up. You can’t get sand in your eyes when you’re standing up, and you will see that nothing changes in the sandbox.

• My reactions can be changeless if I want them to be. I could see peace instead of this. On the practical level within the dream, this is seen within the changelessness of our response. It’s to not let anything outside of you affect the peace and love in you; to see everything as the same.

• It’s a fact that you embezzled money from me, but no fact justifies anger because no fact disturbs the peace of God.

• “What does this have to do with me?” Ask this of everything that threatens your peace.

• If someone is projecting their self-hatred, what does that have to do with me?

• Good: What does your ego have to do with me? Better: What does MY ego have to do with me?

• If Person-A stabbed the lectern in an attempt to get rid of their self-hatred, and Person-B stabbed me, there would be no difference. It would be different to bodies, but we’re minds. It’s like the baseball player who strikes out and then kicks a water cooler instead of the umpire as a way to get rid of their intense guilt. There are different expressions of this in form, but the content is the same.

• Re the body: Why value the valueless? It’s valueless because it changes; so why put value on it? The only thing of value is the mind.

• Tell me you’re sorry and I melt. Don’t tell me you’re sorry and do it again, and you’re toast! What should it matter to me what your body does?

• Take God as your model for learning. What was His response to His Son’s change? Nothing. He continued to love, he did not change. Nothing happened to Him, His Love, or Reality. That’s how you know the Biblical God is ego; he responded. If he responded, something happened. Then the changeless is changeable. This god becomes the star witness for the ego’s belief in change.

• You can be inspired by the Bible like you can be inspired by Shakespeare or a great work of literature, but the Bible is not real because it’s all about change.

• Special relationships are a colossal set-up. I WANT you to misstep, and I will never let it go. Special love relationships are all about investing in the other person not changing, but everyone changes.

• The practice: Just watch change, but don’t try to change it.

• We accuse others of changing us. My symptoms didn’t start until you changed, and then that changed me. Or: You changed, and then I changed, so you made me into the monster I am. We love change: I attack it in you so I don’t have to look at my decision for change. Our WHOLE LIVES are set up to make it look like you changed me (victimized me), and that I’m not responsible for the way that I feel.

• Ego’s wish: wanting to keep the dream, but blame everyone else for it. Right-minded wish: to awaken by accepting responsibility for my ego’s wish.

• Memory was invented by the ego because how am I going to blame you for what you did to me yesterday if I can’t remember it? Right-minded use of memory is to remember only the kindnesses our brother gives us, as a correction for only remembering his mistakes.

• Who is the you who knows it’s having an ego attack? It’s not the ego. This is the end of the ego because it represents a break from the ego / ego identification.

• Practice: Don’t DO anything. We just watch the ego in action. This is what gets us from lofty metaphysics to their practical application. We’re not asked to give up our special behavior or thoughts, we’re just asked not to judge them. There’s no one who can’t do this.

• Practice: We don’t have to be free of ego thoughts, we just don’t want to rationalize, spiritualize, or justify them. We just recognize we’re having an ego attack, realize we got afraid of love, and now the ego is hanging on for dear life… the ego’s life. And it’s OK.

• Waiting for fear to abate, REDUX: When we find ourselves upset, and we recognize I am never upset for the reason I think, that puts us in the right mind with the right teacher… but while a part of us is able to do this because we are in touch with love, and beginning to welcome love, we are aware that another part of us is still afraid of love, a part that is not totally ready to say I am a child of God… so we wait patiently for ourselves to catch up with Who we are in reality. We wait because if I do anything other than wait then it’s my ego speaking. We experience our resistance as a waiting process. What we experience as a delay is our fear of saying “I’m not sure I want to to totally let go.”

Summation: We are still afraid of love even while we’re taking steps to come closer to it, so we remain patient and gentle with ourselves through the process, waiting for the fear to abate.

• The world lies to us because the ego is a lie that made the world, a lie. We have an illusory body programmed by an illusory thought system.

• Practice: When you are angry, don’t beat up on yourself. Say impassively, “I’m judging myself. So what else is new?”

• The Problem: the mind’s decision for guilt. So we make guilt real, but then attempt to prove it’s not in me by making everyone else, everything else, responsible for the horrendously horrible guilt I feel. Now I’ve removed the problem from my mind and placed it in the world so that I wouldn’t have to look at my decision, so I wouldn’t see it’s made up, so it would never be solved.

• You want to get to the point where you can recognize, “The guilt I am perceiving in someone else is a projection of my mind’s decision for guilt. And the destruction in the world I see is a projection of the destruction guilt has wrought in my mind.

• If you don’t undo the thought you killed God you will continue killing.

• If I don’t undo the disease of guilt in my mind, I will just move from one disease to the other.

• Practice: the way we heal the disease of guilt is to withdraw the projection and realize I chose it (guilt, and the projection) to preserve the illusion I exist, and if I chose it, I can change my mind.

• You could say Plato is the father of ACIM, that ACIM is the culmination of Plantonic and neo-Platonic thinking, that ACIM is the 20th century version of Platonism. ACIM is all about appearances and reality.

• Don’t trust anything that changes. It’s only value is to use it as a means to learn about the changeless in our right mind. Use the changeable to return you to the correction of Atonement in the mind.

• When you are right-minded you won’t turn your back on people in pain, you will be fully present to the pain, and the love in you will lightly touch it.

• We changed our Self to a self, from a Self God created to a self I created, from One joined with Everything to one joined with nothing.

• Salvation = saved from my belief that guilt is real.

• Look at your decision for guilt and say I made a mistake.

• Miracle: returning attention from world to mind.

• The only change to be taken seriously: I changed from love to fear, and now I can change back again.

• The changelessness in us is the memory of Who we are as Christ.

• Why participate in someone ego’s dream? Because it works for you; it reinforces you are a body in a dream.

• At this point you don’t have to accept the world is an illusion, but you can learn it is an illusion that someone else stole the peace of God from me.

• If I felt whole within me nothing in the world would affect me.

• You’re not bound by suffering because it can so easily be changed.

• The mind is timeless but not eternal.

• The body’s ladder will always lead you down; the mind’s ladder will always lead you up.

• The dogs of guilt run wild in our dreams, we let our guard down in our dreams, because when we wake we can always say, “It was just a dream.”

• Our feelings are so changeable, we should never trust them. QUESTION: How can you distinguish between an authentic peaceful feeling, and one you shouldn’t trust? ANSWER: If it embraces every person and every possible situation, otherwise it’s changeable. It’s the all-inclusive nature of peace/forgiveness that tells you it’s true. If you’re peaceful because of a circumstance – a nature scene, a relationship working – then you leave or something changes, and the feeling is gone, then it wasn’t peace. The peace was not what it seemed; it was contingent upon the form rather than being a reflection of a decision in the mind. Let the form take you back to what is inside of you, to what is always there, and is changeless.

• Trust emotions that don’t exclude, that are kind, that aren’t strong; trust intuition and emotions that are quiet and calm, but none of the rest. If you are following the guidance of the Holy Spirit/Jesus, their guidance will embrace all events, circumstances and people without exception. Guidance would be a thought; it might have a feeling, but it would be soft.

• When we are in pain and take a pill and go from pain to being pain-free we glorify the change on the level of the body because we glorify the original change (separation). But if you’re in pain take the goddamn pill; no one needs to be in pain, regardless of the reason/cause.

• We’re attracted to both pleasure and pain because it says the body is real. I’m real. That the thought (of separation) it came from is real.

• Be normal: Maximize your pleasure, and minimize your pain, just don’t take it seriously, don’t think it can bring you the peace of God.

• Nothing that happens in the world can change the changelessness of the Love that created me and the Love that I am.

• Use the changeable to learn that all I really want is the unchanging.

—

The Method in our Ego’s Madness, May 24-26, 2009

• In the Course Jesus tells us the ego thought system is insane but brilliant, that there is a method/purpose behind it.

• The part of us that likes being specific is terrified that it can be snuffed out in an instant. The ego’s great enemy is the blue circle (decision maker) because it holds the power to snuff me out into oblivion. The decision maker becomes the problem. The fear is of the blue circle.

• Salvation to the ego is keeping the blue circle vacant. As long as it’s vacant the original decision for the ego is preserved and can never be changed.

• The method in the ego’s madness is how to keep the blue circle empty. The purpose of everything in this world is to keep this vacant, to keep the dreamer mindless.

• What makes the ego myth interesting is how one part of our mind (ego) convinces another part of our mind (decision maker) it’s not a mind. Ultimately I learn I’m my own enemy.

• Minds have power, people have no power. People with power have no power. The people with the power behind the people with the power have no power.

• The Son of God cannot remember he is a Son of God unless and until he first remembers he’s a decision making Son of God.

• The entire Course is predicated on us getting back to the blue circle/decision maker. It takes us back to the blue circle which we never left in the first place.

• The ego doesn’t tell us we’re afraid of the decison maker’s power, it tells us we’re afraid of God.

• The whole purpose of the Course is to expose the wrong-minded thought system, the method in the ego’s madness, so we can choose against it.

• At some point we all must come to the realization that nothing here works. Nothing here can give us the peace of God. You must realize how unhappy you are so you can realize how nothing works. That’s who this Course is for.

• Our only hope is to see no hope in the world, and to realize the world is a pictorial representation of our mind’s decision.

• We have to be miserable here because we’re not at Home. Things of the world can satisfy your physical and psychological body, but they won’t give you the peace of God.

• Nature vs. nurture arguments are two sides of the same coin: “I’m the effect of the world.”

• If (court) judges really felt worthy of respect they wouldn’t be so identified with the symbols of respect.

• We keep thinking the mistakes we make are in the world, what our bodies do. If you really want to be healed you have to realize the pain is not coming from where you think it does. Pain is perfect as far as the ego is concerned, because it makes the body real.

• The Course leads us through a process that weakens our identification with the body.

• Whether we believe in the Biblical God consciously, we all believe in Him unconsciously. We all believe that if we go back to our mind that God will be waiting to destroy us.

• The way you shift your identity from the body to the mind is you look at your ego without judging it. That’s all. I don’t have to be ego-free, I just have to look. The ego thought system is preposterous. God/Love wants to punish me? For something I didn’t do? But you can’t see this is preposterous unless you look at it!

• Why do you think Jesus would help you in the world as a body when he tells you there is no world and there is no body?

• As we go along with this Course and its process our purpose changes from protecting the mind, to identifying with the mind.

A couple notes from Rose Marie’s class:

• We’d much rather go through everything we go through as a body than face God’s punishment in the mind. His punishment, we believe, will be much, much worse and eternal. We have red-flag thoughts like, “At least the body stuff will end when I die.” We seem to think it’s one or the other (suffer by own hand, suffer by God’s hand), but Jesus says we’re wrong, that there is another way, that He is the other way.

• Inner peace is not having a healed and whole body. I’m dying of cancer, but what does that have to do with me?

• To be afraid is a most unnatural state of mind, and it’s our natural state of mind that Jesus wants to bring us back to.

• Watch yourself needing/wanting something from someone, getting ready to manipulate them, and realize, “I’m in my ego, and that’s not going to help the situation, and it’s not going to bring me peace.”

• All of my judgments are a way of preserving my separate existence.

• The mind makes up the law, forgets it made up the law, then subjects itself to the law. There is no law of gravity; there is a mind saying, “This is the way it should be.”

• The ego allows some problems to be solved, otherwise we’d begin to suspect something was up.

• If you think you’re going to die from eating burgers then don’t eat burgers, because that’s what they mean to you, that’s the law you believe in.

• As Course students we’re not accomplishing anything, we’re just stopping our denial of the truth.

• No matter what we do we can’t change God’s love for us, or ours for Him. We learn this by teaching it: that no matter what you do, I love you. I understand your ego comes from fear. We demonstrate it in our interactions and we learn love is love, period.

• Sacrifices are bargaining chips to get you back into Heaven. It’s wrong-minded because we don’t have to bargain with God. Everyone gets in.

• The Course comes from as high a source as is possible, but the next course, while coming from the same source, will meet us at a higher level because we’ll be at a higher level, not so invested in the ego.

• The ego takes every spirituality and makes controversies. Blood hasn’t been shed over the Course yet (”that I know of”) but it won’t be long.

• Everyone’s fear is that if they get back to the source of their decision making power that they’ll misuse it again. That’s how the ego gets us. Since there is no time we are doing it over and over again. This moment is ongoing. It seems to have happened in a distant past but it’s not happening in the past, it’s happening right now.

• Memory is a present decision projected into a non-existent past. We make a present decision for the ego and then we justify our hurt by projecting it into a non-existent past.

• The mind is not asleep. It actively chooses to sleep, which means it is not asleep, never asleep.

• Our way is to take care of our needs at someone else’s expense.

• I want to keep my ego’s cake but enjoy it by making everyone else responsible for it.

• We choose to suffer so someone else will be seen as the one who inflicted the suffering. I keep the suffering and the fear, but I give away the sin and the guilt.

• In your suffering of any kind you see your own concealed desire to kill. 99.9% of Course students don’t know these lines. What this means is that anytime you are in pain you see your desire to kill. Nothing else teaches this. What saves me from God killing me is being a body that is abused and treated unfairly. “God you can’t accuse me of sinning against you, look at what has been done to me.”

• My own concealed desire to kill is my desire for God to kill you and not me. This is awful. This is how we live. This is the method in the ego’s madness. I HAVE to kill because in the ego’s system it’s one or the other. This is silly not sinful, but now you understand why the world is the way it is, why people are so vicious and cruel: because the cruelty and viciousness is in the thought system of the world… but we project the thought system so the evil is not in me, it’s in “them”. This is not to make you feel guilty, but to give you perspective on how insane you are.

• Every time we have a special thought, an ego thought, it reminds us of our original guilt, and then we hear that line, “Think not He has forgotten,” and we send out the hungry dogs of fear. Either we attack someone else’s body, or we attack our own body (it, too, is outside of my mind).

• This world is not a nice place, and nice people don’t come here.

• The problem is not what people are doing. The problem is not what my ego is doing. The problem is my taking it seriously, making it real, believing the lies of the ego. Nothing happened, so what am I afraid of? It’s MY CHOICE to believe in the ego, because the ego is nothing.

• When we look through the eyes of the ego it takes the body seriously, what happens to the body seriously, guilt seriously. So the problem is not guilt, but my believing in guilt.

• The world’s thinking is different than the Course’s thought system. Even those who think good and noble thoughts still think there is a world. Everyone here is insane.

• The way you escape problems is you look at the problem as it is not the way you’ve set it up. “In your suffering of any kind you see your own concealed desire to kill” – that’s how you’ve set it up. Looking at the problem as it is: My decision maker chose the wrong teacher.

• Nothing is happening here in the world, because nothing is happening in the mind.

• What makes this so difficult is that we’re so heavily identified with the ego and the body.

• The clarity of the problem (the mind’s mis-decision) has been obscured by heavy clouds of complication, which we made to keep the problem unresolved.

• Why listen to the voice of psychosis? What could be easier than listening to this and saying, “I don’t want to listen to this anymore. It hurts too much.” No one would keep banging their head against a wall if they knew that’s what was causing them pain; then why keep listening to the ego? The secret of salvation is to know I am doing this unto myself.

• The ultimate truth is “I forgive you for what you haven’t done” because there are no brothers, only me… but the practical application is, “I forgive you for not taking the peace of God from me.”

• When the Course says “forgiveness is still and quietly does nothing”, or “I need do nothing”, it’s not asking us to be physically passive. It’s asking us to be passive to the ego.

• Re: Waiting for the fear to abate: To the extent I am attracted to the ego, I must wait. Forgiveness is still and quietly does nothing, it merely looks and waits and judges not. I must be patient with myself. I still feel resistant, but now I am aware of the resistance – that’s the difference. So that’s when we “judge not”. I see I am too afraid and I no longer justify my fears, anger, and phobias. We sit in the theatre with Jesus watching, “The life and hard times of _________ .” Watch yourself do all your ego stuff: being weak, vulnerable, sick, special, angry. You look at the person on the stage and you don’t judge yourself, even though there is still a part of you who is still attracted to the character. You are gentle and kind to yourself for still being attracted to the ego. You are not yet to the point where you can say “All of this is an illusion” – you see it’s all an illusion but one I’m not ready to give up yet. And you are kind with yourself, and thus everyone else, knowing everyone is in the same boat.

• You have to begin to see that consciousness is painful and is the cause of all suffering.

• There cannot be a guiltless individual. There cannot be a joyful individual.

• As long as we are identified as bodies, what goes on here is very, very serious.

• The Holy Spirit is our right-minded thought that we personify because we have personified ourselves. “You cannot even think of God without a body” because you think you are a person, so the Course matches our experience and talks about God as a He. Jesus and the Holy Spirit are a thought.

• There’s a figure roaming around the dream called “John Doe” and thinks, in its insanity, that the Course is written for him. The “I” is not the person running around here, it’s the blue circle, the decision maker. It looks as if the puppet is doing things. We have experiences as puppets, but what is going on onstage is not what’s going on. What you see onstage is an outside picture of the mind’s condition.

• What is really happening when we read the Course is happening in the blue circle. Since we think we are a body, when we choose to listen to the Holy Spirit that decision is translated into bodily terms, projected in a form we can understand. This book is the projection of a non-specific thought into a specific form.

• We want a spirituality that makes us live more happily in the dream; we don’t want a spirituality that says we’re not here. That’s why so many people have a hard time with this Course. The world is not ready for this.

• Re: Hearing an inner voice: Bodies think they hear voices. Everyone is channeling all the time. It’s no big deal. You either choose the ego or the Holy Spirit and then project it, so we’re always hearing an inner voice. And everyone loves to hear God’s voice. No one writes books about the ego’s voice. You can’t give a workshop on that. Anything that makes you feel special or deals in specifics you should be very cautious about. The ego can sound very sweet.

• If someone tells you they have a holy relationship with their partner, be careful. If you have a holy relationship with your spouse then you’d have a holy relationship with everyone, so why bother talking about it?

• Question: How do you know if a nice feeling is the peace of God? Answer: If it is not affected by anything that goes on around you.

• When you live a life based on the holy instant everything you do is for the first time. There is no burden, baggage, or boredom because you’re not bringing the shadows of the past to the present.

• Your job is to look at your ego without judgment. Everything else will just come.

• The ego wants to make differences real, and differences always point to the sin and guilt of someone else.

• If the problem is our belief in the reality of differences, the solution is the perception of sameness. You and I are not different. Our bodies and lives may be different, but in the blue circle we are all the same; as minds we are all the same.

• “Nothing so blinding as perception of form.” Why? Because it’s the perception of differences. There’s the appearance of differences, but differences lie.

• Every thought, feeling, or fear we have is the same as saying we’re a body, different from our Creator. And being different from our Creator is the same as saying we’re separate from our Creator.

• Our entire sensory apparatus was made to see differences.

• Your day becomes meaningful because everything is practice. I watch how I want to differentiate. I don’t stop it. I am quiet. I do nothing. I look, I wait, and I don’t judge.

• We all have right-minded experiences, but when we start to explain them we get stuck. The value of the experience is in the source, not the symbols.

• Re: “Forgiveness look, WAITS, and judges not.” …We’re waiting for ourselves to catch up with ourselves. We are Love still attracted to a specific experience.

• Use the symbols of the world, but use them to point beyond the symbol to the experience of love. You have to use symbols, but don’t let them be the end, they are the means to the end. Don’t make the form of Jesus real, don’t make his words real; the love is real. Don’t make the words of ACIM sacred, it’s the Love beyond the words that’s sacred. Use the symbol to get to the source. The trap is that we get attracted to the form/symbol instead of the love behind the symbol. Use the words as a vehicle to get to the content.

• It’s not that you shouldn’t study the Course: You have to understand the world (i.e. the thought system that made it) to one day use it as a classroom to heal your mind.

• You work with the symbols of the world but you know they’re unreal. What is real is the love in everyone’s right mind. That’s what you want to demonstrate.

• The only thing you can ever forgive is yourself. The blue circle. Everything else is a fragmentary shadow of the decision for separation.

• There are contradictory, “hereticial” passages in ACIM (e.g. “What would you have me DO?” or, “I place the future in the hands of God”). They are there for this reason: The ego tells us a bedtime story of sin, guilt, and fear. Then Jesus tells us a bedtime story… it’s the same story, different content. He has to tell us a bedtime story because we’re little children, too afraid of the truth, which is: You’re not in your bed, you’re not even here. Jesus’ story makes God sweet and nice as a correction for the fearful God the ego tells us about. He’s telling us we can trust God. The love behind his bedtime story is true. The purpose behind it is true.

• The form of the Course came from Helen, but the content came from beyond Jesus. There are mistakes in form, but none in content. Jesus didn’t slip. The love of Jesus doesn’t slip because it’s perfect love.

• Praying: Since we’re only and ever the decision maker, when we pray we’re praying to the decision maker. It’s the decision maker forgetting who he is and reminding himself he can choose between the ego and Jesus. The decision maker has forgotten who he is as a decision maker and prays as a body to the decision maker. We are praying to ourselves. Bascially giving ourselves a pep-talk, saying, “Go to the right mind.” At some point, as we make our way up the ladder, Jesus’ voice is my voice because I am no longer identified with the ego.

• The memory of God comes to the quiet mind, so the goal of the Course is to quiet the ego.

• In this world you have to be inconsistent in form, but not in content. You might not agree with someone, but you don’t have to make them wrong. The value of the Atonement does not lie in the manner in which it is expressed.

• The holiness of God lies in each fragment. Not in form, in the mind. God is not in everything. The forms of a grain of sand or homo sapiens do not hold God, the mind does. This is another attempt to make the world real and the forms real. There is no reality here in the world. The forms the broken pieces seem to take mean nothing. The broken pieces of God’s son are thoughts (housed in form). God’s son is not homo sapies. Forms lie.

• The method in the ego’s madness is to make everyone different. The correction for that, the expression of the Atonement in this world, is to see everyone as the same. You know you’ve listened to Jesus as your teacher if you see everyone as the same, meaning you don’t judge.

—

The Ego’s Journey: A Long and Lonely Road, May 23, 2009

• The journey is long because we seek, seek, seek in all the wrong places (the ego’s maxim is “seek and do not find”), and it’s lonely because we’ve put ourselves in a (wrong-minded) box all by ourselves.

• The process is often long, frustrating, filled with pain, anxiety, and conflict, and fraught with guilt, because we judge ourselves for not doing as well as we think we should. Jesus doesn’t push, he doesn’t keep score, and he doesn’t grade us.

• When we really want the peace of God we would enjoy learning. Everything would be seen as joyful because it would help us uncover what needs to be undone. You’re a happy learner because you know your mistakes will be corrected. We should welcome our lapses into ego because this is the way we will learn mistakes are not sins.

• Sin says something serious happened, and there will be serious consequences. Behind all our fears is the thought: “I am being punished for my sin.” There is no sin to be punished for…only a mistake to be gently corrected.

• Whenever you are upset, remember: The world is a maladaptive solution to a non-existent problem. The entire world was made to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.

• A good rule of thumb: Don’t believe anything you read online (or anywhere, for that matter). Why would you listen to anyone who believes in the world?

• If you think something here has the power to take the peace of God away from you then you’re crazy. What happens to the body does not happen to the mind.

• People get upset about war, poverty, violence, disease, but they don’t get upset at the thought system that made these things.

• Nice people don’t come here, guilt-driven people come here.

• Just recognize when you’ve made a mistake… that takes all the wind out of the ego’s sails.

• You have my permission: All you had to do is remember lesson #5 (I am never upset for the reason I think). This will allow you to accept the Atonement and get you Home. You don’t have to read the book. Bring every problem to that one sentence and you will get Home. That’s all you have to do.

• You never have a problem with another but with what they symbolize for you.

• What goes on in the world affects my body, it does not affect my mind. The problem is not what’s happening to my body, the problem is I believe I’m a body.

• We’re not who we think we are; that’s what makes us so resistant, makes the journey so long and lonely.

• The long, lonely journey began nowhere, goes through nowhere, and ends up nowhere.

• The body is in perpetual need: we want to be caressed, cherished, acknowledged, we want people to be kind, thoughtful, loving and sensitive so that we can seek, seek, seek and never find.

• When we made ourselves, we made ourselves lonely. Why? So we’d seek others, so we’d seek outside ourselves.

• The Course is not for us as bodies. It was not written for me as a body. It’s not about one body forgiving another body – how can it be, if we’re not bodies?

• The reason people get so angry if you don’t believe in the Bible is because the Bible supports their individuality. So when you don’t believe in the Bible, the Bible-believer believes you don’t believe in him. (Monk memo: This would also be true if you get angry if someone doesn’t support your understanding of A Course in Miracles.)

• The Course is all about the holy instant, and there is no body in the holy instant.

• “I am a body reading ACIM” is a dead-end if you stop there.

• The Course isn’t holy, the thought of Atonement is holy, and that thought is in your mind.

• The ego’s journey is from the mind to the body, and the Holy Spirit’s journey is up the ladder separation led you down, from the body to the mind. From the mindless world of special relationships to the recognition there is only one special relationship, and it’s with the ego in the mind. But since I don’t know I have a mind, I first have to practice here with people.

• Our lungs are the prototype of what we do with people: I get what I want from you, but now I need you to do it again. And again. And again.

• The only true meaning I can find in my life that will satisfy me is forgiveness because it teaches me I AM the meaning, because I am part of God.

• The only meaningful thing in a world of separation is to learn we’re not separated, and the practical application of that here is to see you and I are the same (by forgiving my perception of differences). Before we can learn we are all One in Heaven we first have to learn we are all the same here.

• When we ask Jesus a question in the world and think we get an answer we’re drawing him into our insanity. It’s a neat trick to believe he is one of us. Jesus doesn’t know about specifics. His answer is love.

• When I ask Jesus for specifics I’m reinforcing I don’t have everything. When I hear him answer, he’s agreeing with me. That’s not the kind of older brother I want. I want one who doesn’t reinforce illusions.

• What we call dying is the end of physical life, which pre-supposes there is a physical life.

• Dread is a defense which protects you from losing your ego, your self.

• You can’t think yourself out of the wrong-minded box, you can’t fight yourself out of it.

• Don’t deny the viciousness and cruelty in the world, but acknowledge beneath the cruelty is a call for love.

• The hallmark of right-minded thinking, of the holy relationship, of vision, of having a relationship with Jesus is: “There are no differences. We’re all the same.”

• Special relationships are attempts to make homes here to hide the underlying terror that we are homeless… and that even if we found our way back Home we wouldn’t be allowed in.

• We think our specialness is good, but we don’t know it’s killing us, and it’s the perception of differences that’s doing that.

• The daily goal of the Course is to see, as quickly as possible, how you make differences real. This is immensely practical.

• You have to exclude people in form (e.g. you can’t have dinner with everyone in this room tonight), but you don’t have to exclude them in your mind.

• If you see differences, you are saying you are alone in the universe.

• The ego principle that sustains separation: one or the other. The Holy Spirit principle that undoes the belief in separation: together or not at all. And what together or not at all means is that we perceive the sameness of God’s son.

• You can converse as if all the differences in form are real and important, just so long as in your heart of hearts you know they are not true.

• The ego means NO ONE well. It has allies, but even those are temporary.

• An ego attack is wonderful. It shows you something you didn’t know was there. Don’t be afraid of your ego. Jesus needs a classroom. If you insist you are ego-free Jesus can’t teach you, and the ego you are cherishing will remain hidden and protected.

• Not taking it seriously means: you don’t give it power to make you happy or sad.

• The way you get beyond it (your ego / judging) is to notice you are doing it. Just be aware of your ego (that you DO take the world seriously), but don’t judge it.

• The way out of the ego is to realize I am in my ego, and I chose that out of fear, and it does nothing but make me suffer. Then stop. Be very gentle and patient with yourself.

• Don’t try to make yourself spiritual – let your ego do what it’s doing, it’s going to do it anyway. Just be aware of it and know what you’re doing.

• If you fight, struggle against, agonize, or analyze your ego, it roots you in the body, and keeps you mindless, and at the mercy of forces beyond your control.

• When we experience love the road is no longer lonely.

—

Love Makes no Comparisons, April 26-28, 2009

• Comparison is based on the perception of differences.

• Sickness is a conflict in the mind displaced onto the body.

• Conflict is made up. There is no conflict in perfect Oneness. It’s something we made up. Rather than look within and see the conflict is made up, which would be the end of the ego, I displace it onto the world. If there is no conflict then there’s no ego, and if there’s no ego there’s no “I”.

• The goal is not to be ego-free, but to have a different interpretation of your ego.

• The problem is not all our ego thoughts, it’s the guilt we have over these thoughts.

• The key idea, the most important thing, is to not judge yourself when you find yourself in an ego state.

• All Jesus does is take away what was never there in the first place, but what we thought was there.

• When you read the lines that say the eyes don’t see and the brain doesn’t think, what do you do with that? You become a blithering idiot. Becoming a blithering idiot is good – it’s the beginning of humility.

• You don’t deny your body, obviously, you just try and not have it front and center in your experience.

• You can’t access your mind through your feelings or experiences as a body. It transcends both.

• The ego can fool us with “peace”, but we’ll know our peace is true if it perceives sameness, and is there in all circumstances. But if you find yourself making comparisons and seeing differences, then that’s your red flag. If it’s not real peace your perceptions will give you away.

• What keeps the ego “there” in our experience is not looking at it. When we look at it with Jesus we see it was never there in the first place.

• There’s nothing wrong with having opinions, you just don’t want to make your opinions a cause for attacking others who disagree with you.

• I’m not responsible for your ego; I’m responsible for joining with your ego. And if I join with your ego, I wanted to join with it, and wanted you to insult/offend/betray me. I WANTED you to insult me, it’s not that I CAUSED you to insult me.

• There is only one special relationship (with the ego in the mind), but since we believe we are bodies we translate that decision into form and act it out.

• Just keep remembering the world is not what you think. It’s a shadow world. This begins to put holes in the ego’s sails.

• ACIM is a thought of Atonement in the mind that has never left its source in the mind.

• All Jesus and the ego are, are reactions to the tiny mad idea in the mind.

• The attitude you want to have is: “Well, that’s what I do when I get fearful. That’s what an ego thinks.” That’s not taking your ego seriously. This kind of attitude is very, very helpful.

• Looking at the ego is unsettling at first because the ego’s very foundations are being threatened.

• The ego thought system does not exist, it SEEMS to exist only because we believe in it. You can’t MAKE nothing something, but can BELIEVE nothing is something.

• At some point you will think, “This is crazy! I don’t want to walk around feeling unfairly treated all the time.”

• When people want to change the power structure of the world, they’re taking it seriously.

• Taking something seriously means believing it makes us happy or sad.

• If you take spirituality or ACIM seriously you’re taking the ego seriously. If you take ANYTHING seriously then the ego is involved. You should giggle your way through ACIM.

• You shouldn’t laugh at other people’s suffering, you should laugh at your taking seriously other people’s suffering.

• There’s a part of us that already knows, and a part of us that’s desperately trying to forget, and all Jesus does is help us remember the part that already knows.

• When I use someone to get my needs met, I am attacking them.

• The world is a pictorial representation of my attack thoughts.

• What you want to do is always bring the problem back to its source. The only reason we’re ever anxious is because we’re afraid to go back to our mind and choose differently.

• You should not take anything we’re talking about metaphysically and use it as a guide for behavior.

• If you try to “act like you’re spiritual” you’re unconsciously making the body real.

• To protect myself against myself I make myself mindless and then my focus goes to my sick body, or sick news, or a sick (egoic) person… but this is not what I’m afraid of; I’m afraid and upset because of my mind’s decision.

• We make comparisons to make the world real (e.g. “I want you to be the way a husband is supposed to be”, and then that’s what we use to justify our anger, but it’s a lie. Failing people – or failing bodies – do not make us upset.

• If there’s nothing outside you, there’s no one outside you, and there’s never been anyone outside you.

• Past lives are a defense against looking at who you are right now.

• As soon as you can become aware of a feeling that’s not totally peaceful, that’s not all-inclusive, you know you’ve gotten afraid of love, and then protected and preserved that choice by shrouding it in guilt, and then shrouding the guilt in a world. To really understand this and watch it operate in your life is EXTREMELY helpful. This allows us to “see the problem as it is, and not the way you’ve set it up.”

• If you’re afraid and you stop blaming other people, or even as you’re blaming them a part of you is aware of what you’re doing, that cuts into the defense.

• The ego was born out of conflict (with God), so it thrives on conflict.

• We’re always paying attention to the demands of our body, but the demands of specialness also mean we’re always paying attention to our psychological needs. We’re always on the make, seeking to control relationships to get our specialness needs met.

• There must always be someone out there to hate so I don’t have to deal with the self-hate in my mind.

• If you feel someone is attacking you it’s only because you attacked them first (which means you must have attacked yourself first).

• If I don’t experience peace in a marriage or in an ACIM group it’s because I’ve made it a battleground.

• Whenever you see the world as a place with victims you see it as a place of damnation, and you will judge the people who are damning the victims.

• It’s normal, as humans, to be creatures of our past, and that line of thinking would work if we were humans. But why would we want to be humans?

• The issue with the past is we make a choice in the present to hang onto the past.

• Joy comes from recognizing the ego thought system is unreal.

• The Holy Spirit does make comparisons but it is not amongst bodies, it’s between the two thoughts systems in the mind.

• We’ve all already made the choice for Atonement, we just haven’t accepted what we’ve chosen.

• The right mind is only a correction for the wrong mind, and its content is to look upon the wrong mind and not judge it.

• Questioner#1: I have problems sleeping. Ken: But does it have to be a problem? No? Then let’s not worry about it. Maybe it’s your attitude toward not sleeping. It doesn’t have to be a big deal. Take magic, but don’t make a big deal about it.

• Questioner #2: I have a problem with sleep apnea. Ken: Deal with your body in whatever way would be comforting and helpful, without it being a big deal. Just don’t make it front and center. Think of it like eating. This is something I need to do, so just take care of it, and don’t obsess over it. The crucial thing is how you approach it. Don’t make it into a problem or an issue, or a spiritual issue – don’t question it spiritually, that’s a trap. Just take care of it. Try and not to make it front and center; that’s the defense. The problem is not the sleep apnea, it’s taking it seriously. That doesn’t mean you don’t take care of it, you just don’t make it into an issue. The ego loves to make issues out of things. The spiritual approach is you don’t make a big deal about it, you don’t make it the end all and be all of your life. You can still have sleep apnea and have the peace of God. You deal with it like normal people would, you just don’t make it front and center.

• Before we learn we are not bodies, we learn to not let it be something that distracts us… we learn this by choosing not to make a big deal about what we do with our bodies.

• Just as we get addicted to alcohol or drugs, we are all addicted to judgment.

• Anger is not natural it’s a decision. Fear is not natural, it’s a decision.

• If we feel guilty about anger we disguise it as a small twinge of annoyance.

• When you judge you are destroying the Sonship. That’s the crucifixion of Christ. That’s what we relive over and over every time we judge, every time we give power to the world to affect us. But don’t judge yourself for holding judgments. This takes away the burden to be ego-free. We just don’t make a big deal about our ego.

• If you’ve ever been present at a birth, the first cry you heard was, “I’m here, but it’s not my fault” We never stop that infant cry. We never stop alerting people that we are here, either through how wonderful we are, or how awful. How could your heart not go out to people who feel they have to live that way?

• We don’t think it’s our decision for guilt that is the cause of our suffering.

• We’re not responsible for other people’s egos, but we are responsible for luxuriating in them.

• Just being aware of what we’re doing is healing. And being aware of it with a gentle smile is true healing.

• What gets us to the Oneness is the everyday practice of the reflection of that Oneness: seeing everyone the same.

• The only way I can truly forgive is to realize there’s nothing out there to forgive. If you don’t understand projection you’ll think there really is someone out there, including you.

• The words might sound like they’re talking to a body, but they lead us to where we really are: the mind.

• There is a direct correlation between your judgments and your desire to remain asleep.

• The issue is never what your body does… because you’re not a body!

• Don’t judge worldly situations. i.e. “This happened because I had to learn x,y,z…” Well, maybe that’s true, but the ego can really jump in when we do that. All we need to know is what we’re doing in our minds, and why.

• Religions and parents don’t instill ego thinking, they reinforce it.

• When I REALLY begin to understand that no one has made me this way, and that I could choose peace instead of this, then I will give it up.

• The way we move up the ladder is to generalize forgiveness. The boss is not the determiner of my misery, nor is my wife, nor is my government… etc.

• Pride is a sign that I value who I am; that’s why it’s so hard to give it up. The same goes for being right, specialness, anger, criticism, judgment…

• There is no “level of the body”. Nothing leaves the mind.

• Relationships don’t have to be worked out between people, because there aren’t people. When I experience pain it has nothing to do with the relationship, but which teacher I have chosen.

• The qualitative shift occurs when you realize this is ALL about the mind, and not about the body. You might still have fear thoughts, but you will never be the same. Your peace will no longer be at the mercy of forces beyond your control.

• The process of A Course in Miracles is that it gets easier and easier to identify that I am never upset for the reason I think. That’s what takes time, the shrinking of that gap between believing I AM upset for the reason i think, and remembering I am NEVER upset for the reason I think.

• How can there be 100 monkeys when there is only ONE monkey??

—

The Special Relationship: “A Fusty Nut With No Kernel”, April 25, 2008

• Title of workshop is from Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida”

• Fusty means: fetid, spoiled, rancid. i.e. special relationships stink and they have no substance.

• Guilt is a problem which demands a solution. Enter special relationships.

• Special relationships arise when we identify with a self-concept which has a foundational premise that something is lacking, something that can’t be fixed from within.

• There are people out there that I perceive have a special something that I think will meet my special need. When they meet that need, we call that special love. When they don’t, the hate which was always there quickly surfaces.

• Scarcity inevitably leads to deprivation. The law of scarcity gives rise to the law of deprivation which says that if I’m lacking something it’s because it was originally mine and someone took it from me… and therefore I am justified in getting it back. It’s an expression of the principle of “one or the other”. The most extreme and terrifying example of this principle is “kill or be killed”. This is not a nice world, because the thought system upon which it is based is not nice. Nice people don’t come to this world. Nice people stay home where they were created.

• This is not to say you should feel guilty. You can’t exist here without special relationships. Don’t feel guilty because you feel you need oxygen or like companionship. Just look upon with the attitude, “Of course, this is what it means to live in the world,” and realize things are not what they seem.

• We hate people we are dependent on because whatever it is we are dependent upon them for, we believe they stole it from us, and are now forcing us to work to get back what was rightfully ours in the first place.

• Content = guilt. Form = anything we do to deny the guilt so we can cover it over so we that don’t feel the pain.

• Not only is there no world (the fusty nut), the thought of guilt in the mind doesn’t exist (there’s no kernel).

• If there is no separation, if nothing happened, then there’s nothing missing in me, and where are my needs? They’re all gone. And where am I? I disappear along with them.

• What is particularly pernicious about special relationships is that they appear to exist between bodies. How could an hallucinating figure forgive another hallucinating figure? It only happens in mental wards. Forgiveness is when your decision maker recognizes it chose the wrong teacher and makes a new choice. I look at my wrong decision and see THAT as the source of my disease, disquiet, discomfort. When you do this, the world becomes less serious. Special relationships in the world are a grand subterfuge to conceal the only special relationship: our decision for the ego in the mind… and it’s nothing.

• The goal of the Course is for us to become lucid dreamers, which we must become before we awaken from the dream entirely.

• I need do nothing = there’s no problem, body, relationship that requires healing or peace. What I need do something about is my mind’s decision for guilt, and what I need is a little willingness.

• It is not necessary for us to get in touch with our desire to be separate from God, but it is necessary – and very easy – for us to get in touch with our selfishness. e.g. “Get out of my way, I’m late.”… “I don’t care about, I just want my needs met.”

• Selfishness is innate in the species because it is innate in the separated mind.

• Infants: I want what I want and I want it NOW, and if you don’t give it to me I will make you pay. Well, we never stop being infants we just become more sophisticated in playing this out.

• We start crying at birth and we never stop, and our tears are always manipulative. They are designed to get us what we want. On the level of the body this is considered “adaptive”, but there is no body. It’s not adaptive, it’s vicious! On the level of the mind it is controlling, manipulative and vicious.

• This shouldn’t make you feel guilty… it should motivate you to give it up!

• If you are using someone to meet your needs, that is attack. And you will believe they deserve to attack you back. The core of the special relationship is that I hate you because I’m stealing back from you what you stole from me, and I will therefore believe you hate me as well.

• You can’t see someone as the same if you see them as having something you want or need.

• The concept of having to be a hard worker comes from sacrifice: It’s always a reaction against not wanting to do it but having to do it or I won’t get what I want.

• The fusty nut = the form that feels so much pain… but there’s no kernel.

• The way out: to realize the special relationship is not between oneself and something else. You can’t solve a problem that’s not here. So it’s deciding whether I want to be an ego or not.

• Every problem is the same, and when you remember that you will be able to return to your mind much more quickly.

• The conflict we feel in the world is always a misplaced emphasis. It’s a displaced expression of being conflicted about which teacher I want to listen to… and in recognizing that as the problem, it will make my life much easier.

• I would rather be mindless and unhappy than be a mind, because if I am a mind I will choose against the ego.

• The end of special relationships is realizing it’s nothing. There’s no kernel of guilt.

• The special relationship is a charade. It’s made up.

• Don’t take anything seriously. It would only be serious if it had the power to take away the love of God from us, and that is impossible. The gentle laughter of the Course is born of the recognition you have NOT taken the peace of God away from me.

• The Course is not written for a body, it’s meant for a decision making mind. To teach a decision making mind that it has made a mistake.

• When we make the world of the body real, we are making the world of the mind a dream.

• I always make fun of Course students because they take what I have been talking about and use it as a way of not being normal. Until one TRULY KNOWS the body is an illusion, you should live a normal life like everyone else, but begin to remember everyone is the same. What I can learn is not that we are all One in Spirit, but that all of us who seem to be in the world are the same. Everyone has a split mind.

• The core of special relationships is differences, so undoing that would mean seeing sameness.

• You don’t have to master the metaphysics of the Course, you can be normal, and normal means not taking your attack thoughts seriously, giving up the perception of differences, and seeing sameness.

• The practice: Notice how often you perceive differences, but realizing you don’t have to judge or attack yourself for your misperceptions. You become aware of your NEED to see differences, and not judging yourself for that is very helpful.

• A quiet mind means quiet to the ego, which means seeing everyone as the same. The perception of sameness is the inevitable result of being with Jesus.

—

Teaching and Learning, March 16-20, 2009

• The Course is a myth, a set of symbols which explain what can’t be explained any other way (other than with symbols).

• I’m going to speak about the characters in this myth (decision maker, ego, Jesus) as if they were real, just as any myth does. But they are not people or entities. The problem is people read the Course like the Bible – they think it’s true. In A Course in Miracles Jesus uses (the familiar Christian) language of the myth but changes the content.

• What gives the ego its seeming power is nothing inherent in the ego. It is our belief in it that gives it its seeming power and existence.

• The ego’s fear is: What if the sleeping Son of God remembers he’s a decision maker? What if he returns his self-awareness back to the blue circle as a decision maker? (See chart for context.) He will choose again and I will disappear. – It’s an incredibly overwhelming and powerful fear. It’s what motivates us every moment of our lives. Everything here is designed to keep the blue circle vacant.

• The ego’s plan is: Prevent the sleeping Son of God from ever changing his mind… so the logic of the plan is to convince the Son of God he doesn’t have a mind, and therefore no decision-making power. Thus is the decision preserved forever.

• The ego’s purpose: To have the Son of God forget he has a mind. Purpose is everything. Understanding this purpose will open up the entire Course for you. The world was made on the singular wish: GET ME OUT OF HERE! (Out of the mind.)

• You’re never upset for the reason you think; you’re upset because you chose against God and you think he will retaliate (crucifixion)… and you’re not even truly afraid of that… you’re afraid you will get back to the blue circle (mind) and choose again (redemption). That’s your true fear.

• The only sane way of living in the world is to recognize what the world is. It’s nothing. I’m not my body, I’m a mind, and can change my dream, who I’m dreaming with. That’s real freedom.

• Re: feelings. Peace is not a feeling. Joy is not of this world, it’s not joy of the body (though it can be experienced that way – that’s not its source or reality). Right-minded joy is a quiet joy that is not contingent upon anything here in this world.

• People say trust your feelings. That’s the last thing you should trust! You should trust a thought of peace when it embraces everyone.

• What is the role of feelings? To prove I am a body. What we all want is to stay in this dream but have less pain (but still keep the neuroses). What we all want is a less threatening neuroses.

• Feelings or emotions are the projection of one of two thoughts. I will know what teacher I have chosen by my feelings. The litmus test of a right-minded feeling: If I feel peaceful and, AND, it includes everyone AND every situation. This is much more than a feeling.

• Famous bumper sticker: Whoever dies with the most toys wins. ACIM student’s bumper sticker: Whoever dies with the most victim scripts wins.

(Ken said, “It’s a race: Who can amass the most victim scripts.” I editorialized from there. I have to be careful now; there are actual students in class reading my notes. Someone might say to me, “I never heard about no bumper stickers,” and THEN where would I be?)

• We never stop being a decision maker. Even when we forget we’re a decision maker, we as a decision maker are choosing to forget we are a decision maker. We actively choose against the Holy Spirit then actively choose to forget we actively chose against the Holy Spirit.

• The practice of ACIM: Just recognize what you’re doing with your ego, and how awful it is… for everyone, but especially for you. That’s all you have to do. Don’t work at it. Just knowing what we’re doing with our egos is extraordinarily helpful and right-minded. Knowing what we’re doing – even when we can’t stop what we’re doing – is VERY healing.

• Re: teaching and learning: Clearly teaching is not anything the body does. Teaching and learning has nothing to do with behavior, but rather with what goes on in our minds.

• If you think you have to “get the message out there” then you don’t understand the message.

• If you think ACIM needs to be taught to the multitudes… what multitudes? Who are you going to convert? Puppets??! (Lots of laughter from the puppets.)

• In regards to the 100th monkey theory. How many monkeys will it take to tip the scales? One! You. (Lots of laughter from us monkeys.)

• Question to Ken: So why do you do what you do? Ken: You think I’m doing something?? The worst thing you can do is take what you do seriously, and I can assure you I don’t take what I do seriously. Everyone has to do something, and for me it was either this or spending time in the bars.

• Teaching in this Course has nothing to do with what goes on in the world. The decision maker has to be taught, has to learn, that it is a decision maker, and that it chose wrongly.

• You can’t teach ACIM to anyone – there’s no one out there. And if you think you’re teaching ACIM to someone, you’re not teaching ACIM.

• As a therapist / teacher (or plumber) I just watch my thoughts, my judgments, and realize I need to change my therapist/teacher, and that it is my healing that is needed in this classroom. Patients/students aren’t there for what they think they are there for, but to learn guilt is not real. It’s not my brilliance that teaches this, but my kindness.

• The Manual for Teachers is not about teaching ACIM in form; it’s about demonstrating that his love lives in us. Why would Jesus teach bodies to teach other bodies? He’d have to be in his wrong mind.

• You don’t undo your ego. You can’t undo what doesn’t exist. You undo your belief in the ego. This is a very important distinction. You don’t correct the ego thought system in you or in anyone else. When you attempt to do that you’re making it real. You’re saying it’s an actual thought, not an impossible thought. The ego is nothing – you correct the belief.

• You don’t change the body, the world, or the wrong mind… you change the decision maker’s choice for the ego.

• I am often asked, “Are things getting worse in the world?” The answer is no. The forms are getting worse, but the content is the same. Nothing is different. The ego thought system of 100% hate has always been there.

• Where you might read the Bible and pray, “Jesus, please smite my enemies”, a Course student might read the Course and pray, “Jesus, please smite this disease that is giving me a hard time, my sick bank account, my joblessness – the things that seem to be enemies to our peace.” It’s the same thing.

• Wrong mind: “This is terrible.” Right mind: “This (choosing the ego) is terrible… and why would I want to keep doing this?”

• You don’t deny what is happening to you. That’s not spirituality. You deny it has had any effect on the love in your mind.

• Nothing in this Course says not to do things in the world, you just know you’re not the one doing it. If you think you are, then you’re caught up in the same mess you’re trying to help.

• Before the development of Germ Theory surgeons wouldn’t wash their hands before operating. These surgeons with dirty hands would spread disease, not heal it. In the same way, we’re asked to clean our minds before helping. (To bring our judgments to Jesus before operating in the world.)

• One of the things that happened right at the beginning is that A Course in Miracles students forgot how to be normal. Unfortunately, not much has changed.

• If you’re in a restaurant and the music is too loud, the lesson isn’t to sit there and try to figure out how to suffer through it. That’s the arrogance of the ego, thinking “I know what the lesson is.” I have a choice. I can sit here and be miserable, or I could see peace instead of this. If I can’t, then the lesson is to forgive myself for being unpeaceful, and say, “This is not a sin. I’m not a sinner.” You could then choose to leave and find a quieter restaurant, and the lesson would become, “How can I walk out of this restaurant without guilt? …not, “How can I sit here and suffer through it?” That’s stupid, not holy. This is not spirituality.

• The ego loves no win situations. E.g. You’re asked to help but don’t want to. If you do help, you feel sacrificial and resentful. If you don’t help, you feel guilty. The ego loves that.

• If someone can’t say no, can’t set limits, then they haven’t escaped from ego-centricity.

• If you feel unworthy, inadequate, or inferior, one defense against that is to act very loving so as to trick the world and God. “Look, I’m not this awful person (that I believe I am).” You’re not helping from the love in you, but from the guilt in you.

• Burnout occurs when you operate on your own current. It’s the difference between using batteries or being plugged in to an electrical current. If you’re going to be a helper, then you don’t want to be doing it on your own. You want to be plugged into the Holy Spirit. Then you’re not relying on your own resources, and there will be no resentment or sense of sacrifice. And you will know what a person needs because you won’t be impaired by your own needs/neediness.

• Sometimes people will sit and meditate for an answer from the Holy Spirit. There is nothing wrong with that if you don’t have an ego. What you have to understand is there is a wrong-minded inner voice, too. People think just because they’re hearing an inner voice it MUST be the Holy Spirit.

• Your task is not to hear the Holy Spirit’s voice, but to seek and find all the barriers you’ve placed between yourself and the Holy Spirit. So your job is to be vigilant for the ego. The help you should be asking for is looking at your ego and not judging it. This is not a course in the positive; it’s a course in undoing the negative. The goal of this course is peace. What is peace? Undoing the ego’s conflict. The miracle doesn’t add, it takes away.

• If I ask, “Should I talk to this person?”, I’ll hear nothing. And if I do, I should do the opposite (laughter). Instead I should ask for help in regards to my need, my anxiety, my investment in talking to this person. Those things cloud and distort your perception. Without those things there is no ego, and no question. Love will just flow through you effortlessly.

• Sometimes the most loving thing is to tell someone “no” with defenselessness. That can be a wonderful lesson.

• We’re not learning how to be in the world, but how to be in our minds.

• Again, this is not a course in the positive, but in undoing the negative… therefore, what it means to practice shared interests is not to practice separate interests. Shared interests is looking at separate interests and saying, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

• We’re so resistant to the idea “I need do nothing” because we came into the world by doing, and we live in a world that is doing all the time. Since the doing is the source of the guilt, that’s why we’re so compelled to do good things.

• When Jesus says “anger is never justified” he’s not saying “don’t get angry,” he’s saying, “don’t justify it”.

• The only world you need to heal is the world of your mind.

• Serious A Course in Miracles students take the ego seriously. Once you take the ego seriously you’re lost. To learn this course means to let go of your ego.

• The best defense against anger is peace. Anger is not about people, it’s a preconceived defense against peace.

• Look at the problem as it is (I chose wrongly as a mind) not the way you’ve set it up (you chose wrongly as a body and stole my peace).

• We can’t get to the love in the mind until we practice it in the world because that’s where we think we are.

• Re: guilt: How can what doesn’t exist diminish? What diminishes is the amount of time we spend in the wrong-mind.

• You need motivation to be a happy learner; you need to see your misery.

• It doesn’t matter how many times you think you fail along the way, you’ve already passed the final exam.

• The puppet and everything on the puppet stage is lifeless.

• Re: abortion: It doesn’t matter what side of the issue you are on – pro-life or pro-choice – you’re wrong. How can you kill what doesn’t exist? We should all be pro-choice and pro-life in the mind, with pro-life being the choice for the right mind.

• The world (body, personality etc. is a defense against God’s wrath) is a maladaptive solution (maladaptive because it doesn’t work) to a non-existent problem (the non-existent problem of guilt in the mind).

• Questioner: I feel guilty about having killed a spider that frightened me. Ken: You want to shift your focus from the form – that you killed the spider – to the thought. Forgive yourself for the fear that led you to attack, and then be done with it.

The spider is in our way so we get rid of it just as God was in our way so we had to get rid of Him. Lift it from you here to you as a mind needing to get out of the way what made me uncomfortable (love). Now I believe the dream is making me fearful, and now I feel justified in killing the spider.

The problem is not the spider or what I do with the spider, but what I do with myself after I have taken seriously what I have done with the spider.

• The theme of every single scene in the dream is: I am the hero, I exist, and it’s not my fault.

• Watch your story, but see how your story is keeping you from Heaven.

• Jesus says, “Come to where I am.” What do we do? We bring him to where we are.

• No matter how much your body or your psyche hurts that’s not why you are upset or unpeaceful.

• If you think you like Jesus then what are you doing here?

• If I think what is going on in my life is real there’s no way I can laugh at it.

• The only thing that has to be forgiven is our decision making self that chose the wrong teacher.

• Don’t believe the language of the Course, believe the content. It’s not the words that are important, but the love behind the words. People get stuck on words because they get stuck on bodies.

• Three steps of forgiveness:

Step 1: I forgive you for what you haven’t done. No matter what you’ve done with your body, you haven’t stolen the peace of God from me. You’re not the reason for my unhappiness. The guilt is not in you.

Step 2: The guilt is in me, but the guilt in my mind is unjustified because I haven’t sinned. I put the guilt there, so the decision maker is the problem, not the guilt.

Step 3: Holy cow!*

* Good chance (100%) Ken did not say “Holy cow”.

• Before I can realize I am the Mind God created, I must realize I am the mind I miscreated.

• Questioner: How do you handle it when people say this course is all about love and light? Ken: If people are telling me, rather than asking, what the Course means then I wish them well. I’m not into making trouble. (laughter) People just want to know they are accepted and loved the way they are.

• Questioner: Is that really it? Is all I have to do is look at the problem? Ken: Yes! Because there is no problem. That’s why you have to look. Complication is a defense to conceal the simplicity of the real problem/solution.

• The cost of my despair/pain is worth it because there is an I that is suffering.

• Questioner: It seems to get worse as it goes along. Ken: It was always worse. It’s getting worse because it’s getting better. It’s the pain of the ego that will cause you to give it up.

• A commonly held thought by students of the Course is that you need someone else to join with you for the miracle, healing, a holy relationship. You don’t. You need you. Your forgiveness. Otherwise you’d be stuck. I can only be healed by welcoming you into the kingdom, but I don’t need you to take my hand.

• We don’t forgive another but only ourselves because we are only of the mind, not the body.

• If people choose to be in pain all I can do is forgive them, which means I don’t judge them.

• Only one person has to learn and teach this course. You. How many teachers of God are required to save the world? One.

• You can only be fully present to someone who is suffering if you come without your own agenda, neediness, guilt, anxiety, need to be a wonderful caregiver etc.

• Don’t give anything in this world the power to make you happy or sad. NOTHING.

• The only thing that should make you happy is learning everything you’ve ever taught yourself is wrong.

• ALL distress comes from an unforgiveness.

• Question: If you find yourself getting angry do you need to know the specific attack thought? Ken: No. We don’t need to know the form of unforgiveness. Knowing the specific attack thought does not heal, only forgiveness of the unforgiveness heals.

• Unforgiveness is the decision maker’s decision for guilt.

• Blissninny approach: The way I won’t see the horror of the guilt in my mind is by not seeing guilt in the world. Denial is the most primitive defense (because you don’t do anything, just deny – at least in projection you have to do something) but it is still a very powerful defense.

• If you listen, people will tell you what they need. You can’t listen if you think you know what people need. The way you learn to listen is you learn to get your ego out of the way.

• You don’t need ACIM for children you need it for parents. The pamphlet on psychotherapy is about the therapists, not the patients. It’s about helping the therapist become ego-free; then, whatever your expertise is it’ll be utilized to express of the message of guiltlessness.

• We have a need to be abnormal. “I’m not going to have insurance to prove I’m a good Course student. Instead of sending back this piece of un-cooked meat I’m going to eat it to prove I’m not a body.” The purpose of that is to not be spiritual, disguised as being spiritual. If you know you’re not a body then you have no need to prove you’re not a body.

• People do all sorts of things with the Course rather than practice it.

• The only thing that is valuable about this Course is teaching you it has no value, that the world has no value.

• You can reach Heaven by studying the phone book for right-minded purposes.

• We’re continually practicing the same lesson over and over again, but it’s realizing this that speeds us along.

• When you know Jesus is talking to you as a mind and not a body then you will know you have made a qualitative shift. Without that shift there is no way you will understand what this course is talking about, and you’ll be asking for a parking space, and help for your body.

• What you experience as spiritually nourishing is a symbol of the decision for the right mind which is the real source of the nourishment. Just know what’s really happening. If you allow yourself to become dependent on the symbol (it rains and you don’t get to see the sunset and you’re crestfallen) then that’s when it becomes a problem / special relationship.

• If you want to join a cause first join the cause of the Atonement. Before you join a cause here, join his cause.

• When you’re afraid of your mind, which is all you’re ever afraid of, at least be aware that’s what you’re afraid of… that’s honesty.

• All you’re asked to do is see everything as either projection or extension.

• Before we can learn who Jesus is we first have to deny the world’s denial of him. To learn who he is we first have to clear away who he is not.

• Jesus was not God and flesh (as the Bible asserts), and using the Course’s language, he is not truth and illusion. That makes no sense.

• The Jesus of the New Testament/Bible and the Jesus of the Course are apples and oranges. They are totally different.

• Don’t try to understand Jesus through your own (perceived sinful) bodily self. You will distort his true identity.

• The world brought the light (Jesus) into the darkness (world) and we have to be very careful we don’t do the same with A Course in Miracles. What the world did with Jesus, the Course in Miracles world is trying to do with the Course.

• Anytime you think you need to proselytize the Course, that it’s something important, that you’re invested in, then you’re making the same mistake as the early Christians. It’s for one person. You.

• Nothing in the world is true. ACIM is not true. The persons studying ACIM are not true. The person with the name Jesus is not true.

• Instead of leaving the dream and joining Jesus we bring him to where we are and make him part of our dream. This is what Freud called a “dream of convenience”. An example: You are asleep and a phone rings. Instead of waking up and answering it, you bring the ringing phone into the dream. The real Jesus remains waiting for us in the right mind, waiting for us to answer the phone.

• Jesus is a pure thought of Atonement in the right mind.

• 2100 years ago the abstract thought of Atonement was translated into the form of figure we call Jesus. Another form of that thought is ACIM. That’s all it is. It’s our mind that’s giving the form to the content. The thought of Atonement is of no use to us if we think we are a body, so the mind translates it into a form we can understand to lead us beyond the body, beyond the symbol to the source.

• Fast forward 2100 years and out comes the Course, and what happens? We scurry back to where we feel at home, and our eyes look down, and we run back to our friends… sin, guilt, fear and death. And the same thing happens – we fight over it, form factions and churches. The Course becomes another aspect of specialness and a weapon of judgment. All sorts of controversies begin to arise.

• It’s totally irrelevant who Jesus was. People have said Helen missed a great opportunity to ask Jesus questions about who he was. It never occurred to her; she knew it was irrelevant.

• All the Holy Spirit is is a celestial tickle. When you forget and take the tiny mad idea seriously he tickles you and reminds you to laugh.

• Helen didn’t write the book, nor did Jesus. I say things like “Jesus said this, or Jesus said that” only because that’s what the book says. That’s part of the myth so I work within the myth because we’re all part of the myth. But if we are ever going to learn A Course in Miracles we have to move beyond its myth. The Course came from beyond Jesus. It came from the non-specific thought of Atonement which is beyond words, form, and specificity.

• Getting caught up in the story of A Course in Miracles is a defense against its message and teachings.

• Don’t make your life about the Course, bring your life to the Course.

• To say I am Helen and this is Jesus, that’s separation. It’s maintaining a separation between her wrong and right minds. Helen knew what she was doing, which is why I think she was so spiritually advanced.

• The way you operate out of your right-mind is that you don’t focus on your right mind, you focus on the wrong-minded guidance and forgive it. Instead of focusing on how to hear the Holy Spirit’s voice, focus on undoing the interference of hearing His voice, and all that will be left is the love that was always there. Don’t worry about the right mind; it’s always there. You want to get the interference out of the way so the love is not blocked.

• Asking for help is looking at your ego without judgment and saying, “I don’t want this anymore because it hurts too much.”

• The only problem I have with ACIM groups is they take themselves too seriously, and think it’s special. An ACIM group is just another place to see your projections and forgive them, and in that way it’s just like any other classroom.

• I’m not asked to give up my body, to forgive and go Poof! What I’m asked to give up is my interpretation of my body and other bodies.

• You don’t have to think about where this is going, because it’s too frightening. Just be very down to earth and practice the little steps, the lesson that I would be happier, my life would be more peaceful, if I gave up my attack thoughts.

• It’s important to not only learn the Course, but to become the Course… to not only hear the Voice, but to learn we are the Voice.

• It’s very important in escaping one’s fear to respect one’s fear.

• The most important lesson I can learn is to forgive myself for resisting the truth.

• It’s not the book or Jesus you really love, it’s the thought of love they symbolize. That’s what you really love. You want to forget this world, forget this Course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God.

—

The Dark Backward and Abysm of Time, March 15, 2009

• Ken’s usage of the title: dark (hidden), backward (past), abysm (abyss), time (memory)

• Memory is a present decision projected into a non-existent past. We’re just seeing a decision (i.e. choosing the ego as our teacher, which teaches that we exist) our mind is making right now in a past that is not not there. The present decision is to be an ego. That I am a separated individual outside of Love.

• The ego gives us memory so we can remember all the ways we’ve been mistreated so that we can present them to God upon our death.

• We use the past to prove 2+2=4, that the world makes sense. Realizing there is no past is remarkably freeing. It means I don’t have to understand the past. And even if (I thought) I did, I would be wrong, because it would start with the premise “there is a world”.

• The ego is not an external entity, the ego is us. The us that believes there is an us.

• Memory allows me to say “it’s not my fault”. That is its purpose: to reinforce that I exist, and that it’s not my fault (the secret wish).

• You want to become part of someone else’s insane dream because it lets you off the hook. I want you to be at fault so my present decision for the ego won’t be punished.

• This is a course solely interested in teaching us we have a mind. The only thing we should focus on is with which teacher will I choose to look upon my physical / psychological experience. We’re not asked to deny our physical / psychological experience, but to use it to get us back to the mind.

• Whatever happened to me 20 years ago, 2 years ago, 2 minutes ago, 2 seconds ago is irrelevant to what I am feeling right now.

• The ego analyzes, the Holy Spirit accepts. What happened does not matter, what matters is how I react to it. All that matters is who my mind is choosing right now.

• It’s not WHAT you do, it’s HOW you do it.

• The present memory is I look with Jesus’ vision at a problematic relationship, or a body that is getting sick etc.

• If there is no blame there is no longer any use for memory.

• If I am mildly annoyed at you I’m saying, “You did something to affect my perfect peace.” If I am enraged at you I’m saying, “You did something to affect my perfect peace.” There is no hierarchy of illusions.

• We are asked to look at the ego with a sweet smile – not a dismissive smile; it’s a smile that says this has no effect on my mind.

• You can disturb my body but you cannot disturb my mind.

• If I am upset it’s because I want to preserve the dream of which I’m the hero.

• Pain is one of the greatest witnesses to sin. Pain shrieks in agony which covers the shrieks of ecstacy that screams, “I am real!”

• You are not asked to deny pain, you are asked to deny the purpose of pain.

• Magic takes pain away, but not the pain of guilt.

• Pain is chosen by the mind to deny the mind.

• Pain is very serious… to bodies. But we’re not bodies, and since we think we are, this is a difficult lesson. Deal with your pain in any way you have to, but don’t forget about the underlying principle, which is: This is not going on outside.

• Pain is not right-minded, but there is a right-minded USE of pain. Namely, to alert me I chose wrongly. So now that I know that, I can let it go (because pain’s purpose was to conceal that I chose wrongly).

• Jesus is a thought in your mind, just as you are a thought in your mind, but since you think you are a body, you think he is a body.

• If you want to awaken you will use everything in your life as an opportuity to return to your mind.

• I am the way I am today because of a present decision.

• I am not responsible for WHAT I see, but for the WAY I see.

• Nothing in this course should ever, ever be taken to be about the world.

• To our every request for help, Jesus says, “The world you see is an outside picture of an inward condition.” He doesn’t say, “You are a child of God, and you’ve never left Home.”

• The Course will never be as popular as the Bible. There’s a reason I’ve never been on the Larry King Show (lots of laughter). People don’t want to hear everyone is the same. If I can’t project my guilt then I’m stuck with it.

• If you feel great and the world works for you, for God’s sake don’t study this Course. It will expose the lie (lots of laughter).

• To want to learn this Course you need to see: “The way I’m living in the world is not making me happy.”

• Tim stood up and said he has been looking for an epitaph for his gravestone. Ken suggested, Tim who? (Gales of laughter.)

• Since you think you’re a creature of time and space you USE time and space… so memory can be used in a helpful way: to show you you’re on a journey, that it’s a process, that you have a goal, and that the goal is always with you.

• In order to remember Who we are we have to forget the self we made. The use of past memory is used to defend against a present love.

—

Narcissism – The Ego’s Myth, February 15-17, 2009

• Narcissus falls in love with his own reflection in a pool. So entranced with himself, he fails to eat or drink (it disturbs his reflection in the water) and dies.

• Our attraction to our body is a projection of our attraction for the ego.

• Beware of people who say they’re in a wonderful relationship. You can’t have a wonderful relationship with a person. There are no people. You’re having a ‘wonderful’ relationship with yourself. We’re all narcissists! Whatever I love is a projected image of me.

• Don’t be invested in what happens or why it happens, because it roots you in the body and doesn’t get you back to the mind which is the purpose of the Course. You don’t need to know why anything has happened, is happening, or will happen. You just accept whatever happens and say, “I could see peace instead of this.” (lesson 34)

Worrying (anxiety, anger) doesn’t arise out of nowhere. The peace of God/love became too threatening and worrying became a way to defend against it. All you need to know is the purpose: that everything that is not love is a defense against the love in my mind.

• As long as you think you’re a body you deal with bodies: you see your brother without your projections. Namely, that he doesn’t have anything to do with your pleasure or pain. He’s not your savior, he’s not your enemy. You no longer use others to off-load responsibility for your mind’s decision. It’s a “benign specificity” which eventually helps you dis-identify with yourself as a body. You first dis-identify with your physical/psychological self, and then you dis-identify with your wrong-minded self. If you think you’re a body, don’t deal with lofty metaphysical ideas (as a means of practice). Keep it simple and don’t work at it, just be aware of what your ego is doing and say, “That’s okay.”

• Seeing everyone as the same will go a long way to seeing myself as a mind because this sameness is not about bodies, it’s about minds.

• …that’s why nobody likes this Course: because it’s not about form. You will grossly misrepresent and misapply this Course if you think it has to do with bodies.

• You have to practice what this Course says in order for it to work. If you want to be a great pianist you have to practice everyday. Still do your daily tasks, but now you focus on the way you do them, how you do them, with whom you do them. You’re no longer focusing on if people are giving me what I want, your focus now is to do all your normal tasks while looking at what your mind is projecting.

• Guilt casts a shadow: it’s the absence of the light of our innocence. Any moment you see someone as having something that you need, you’re seeing a shadow, something you’ve made up. The only need we have is to see we have no needs.

• I don’t want to give up what I did (banished God) because I like the self that resulted.

• The whole ego m/o is to escape from responsibility, because if I’m not responsible I cannot be punished. So look at what we do: We walk from birth to death BLAMING. Everyone does this.

• We are never happier than when we are miserable (because someone did this to me, and that makes me innocent).

• When we become sick and tired of living a life where we make everyone to blame, everyone wrong, where we seek things and people to fill us up, where we find fault all throughout the day… then we will realize there is a different kind of life. There is a different kind of thought system.

• Definition of “looking”: Recognizing you have a mind that has chosen this.

• All you have to do to be a good student of the Course is to look. To look at your mind’s investment in pain, how it cherishes it, and luxuriates in it.

• Looking means: Realizing the pain is not coming from where it seems to be coming from. What is nothing cannot feel pain. Bodies don’t feel pain. If the truth is that you are a mind then the defense against that is to be a body. That’s why this Course is so difficult, because we actually feel we are a body, and that things are done here. Don’t deny your body but look at the fact that it’s not your body that feels, that chooses, attacks, feels love, pain, pleasure. It merely does what the mind instructs. Even when pain / anger / anxiety is happening, know somewhere this is not what it seems. It’s the only way out. That’s why this Course offers so much hope – because it doesn’t look to anything of the world for hope.

• How do you get back to your mind? By realizing everything is a projection.

• The way to undo narcissism is to be aware of what you’re doing.

• The way to undo the myth of narcissism is to introduce the Jesus myth – the myth of Atonement and forgiveness… to remember that you can choose the myth of forgiveness instead of the myth of attack, and you will do that when you realize how painful it is to live this way, to live as Narcissus.

• A couple of my own ideas to close: We are so enamored of ourselves (enamored of the specialness of the ego thought system) that we starve (like Narcissus) our decision maker by not feeding it the love of our right mind. Do we really want to keep choosing the starved and thirsty world of the ego thought system? While the answer remains “yes”, we need to starve our ego of the judgment it needs – we must look upon the reflections of our decision for separation and not make a big deal out of them. This is how the ego and its reflections will eventually disappear to nothingness, returning whence they came.

• Jesus asks so little: We’re not asked to let the ego go, we are just asked to look at it without guilt. We’re not asked to see our brother as sinless, we’re just asked if we would like to.

• The Jesus of the Course is not the Jesus of the Bible, who clearly believed in sin. Do not confuse them.

• I have a magical belief that through fault and blame I can get rid of guilt.

• Hate is narcissistic. It’s reinforcing the self by attacking other people. I reinforce the self any way I can because I’m so in love with it.

• We hate this Course, we hate Jesus, and we hate God because they remind us this self does not exist.

• It’s very important to recognize how narcissistic we are. We would kill to preserve this self, and we do. It’s impossible to survive in this world without murder because the world was made from the thought that we murdered God. We carefully pretend we are civilized, but we kill micro-organisms with every breath, we kill to eat and drink, when we take a step, but we don’t think about it. It’s not that you should look at these things with guilt – that’s silly – but it’s helpful to see what’s really going on in this world, and in the ego thought system (don’t think of these issues when you breathe/eat, but think of them when you have judgments), so that we can ask if we really want this more than the peace of God? Every judgment is re-enacting the original judgment that says we would be much better off if God were out of the picture.

• All we need to do is expose the ego thought system. That’s what Jesus does in this Course. Honesty is so important. You can’t forgive what is not exposed… but you don’t want to work at it, or go digging. You don’t have to delve into the past because whatever was there is alive and well in your thinking now.

• Looking = you look at what choosing the ego means. It means giving up the love of God. Is it really worth it? Is our self-adoration worth it? Is this a price I’m willing to pay?

• As Narcissus wouldn’t drink from the pool because it would disturb the pristine image of his beauty, we don’t want to disturb the pristine image of hate so we project it out onto everyone else.

• The problem is not that our middle name is Narcissus, it’s that we feel guilty about it. The problem is not the tiny mad idea, or all of its fragmentary shadows, it’s making a big deal out of it, your interpretation of it. Not one note in Heaven’s song was missed.

• Question: Is horror good then? Answer: It’s the ego that says horror is good. If you use the horror to get beyond the horror to the answer, then the horror is good. But just feeling horror is ego. Feeling horrible comes from judging yourself, but to then judge yourself for judging yourself is just silly.

• All accusations say, “Before you came along I had the peace of God,” which can hardly be true because of my unpeaceful self-accusation. I accuse you of taking God’s love from me, but I accuse myself of taking God’s love from Him.

• All I need to know is that if I do my little part today – to live the day with as little judgment as possible – the ending will be happy.

• The thing we cannot forgive God for is that He’s not angry at us. We can’t forgive Him for this because if He’s not angry there’s no sin, and therefore no me. That’s what we hold against Him.

• The purpose of any dream is to keep us asleep.

• The two kinds of denial:

Wrong-minded denial: to look at the ego and say this is so horrific I won’t look at it again.

Right-minded denial: to look at the ego and say, “I don’t want this anymore.”

• The true end of narcissism is getting back to the self that made the decision to embrace the ego thought system.

• When we feel guilty about not helping people it’s because somewhere in our mind we feel we withheld love from God. Saying “yes” to everyone is the need to be liked, and also comes from guilt. “Look how helpful I am” is a defense; it proves to God “I am not the one who stole love from you.” You know it’s ego when you get tired or feel irritable or imposed upon. “Oh no! Another goddamn person to help!” If you do not know how to say no, you haven’t escaped ego-centricity.

• Once you set up your religion – i.e. the way I escape my guilt is through [x,y,z] – and then you fail it, you will feel guilty. It was a trap from the beginning.

• Not having problems or concerns reminds us of our true Self, and we hate that Self, so we create problems or concerns to be reminded of what I want to be reminded of: Me.

• People who say they love this Course, or Jesus, are liars. How could you love something that tells you that you don’t exist?!

• This Course causes you to rethink your entire life, and see it not from the perspective of the body, but of the mind. You will see that I don’t have to work out my problems with my parents but my problems with my mind… which will automatically heal all the worldly issues. All of my concerns and anxieties come from having chosen the wrong teacher. Before you work out any relationship with anyone, work out the relationship with yourself, with your mind. Before addressing any question in the world, address the real problem – having chosen the wrong teacher – and then in the absence of anxiety and anger and guilt, you will know what to do.

• Whenever two people are working something out it’s always about what went wrong – that the other person took your peace away. That’s a lie. The truth is I separated from the love in my mind and embraced the thought system of guilt. Whenever I try to heal a relationship I’m using it not to heal the relationship in my mind… which means I’m inviting them onto the dance floor of death which is really the death of my true self. I don’t want to be a mind interacting with another mind because then this self/body doesn’t exist. You have to become aware of what you’re really doing. Don’t deny your body / personality / needs, just recognize where they’re coming from. We’re not asked to change, we’re only asked to look. Then you will feel better. The hate, resentment and loss will be gone. Why will you not claim that? That’s what Jesus is always asking.

• The statement “nothing here is real” means nothing here has the power to take my peace away.

• When you’re trying to work out a problem you’re already saying it has taken my peace away.

• Heaven is just beyond the wall of judgment.

• There is no Jesus. We have an experience of Jesus, but that’s our mind’s translation of abstract love in a form we can recognize and accept so we can remind ourselves of who we truly are. Jesus is a name we give. To make a big deal of Jesus misses the whole point.

• When you try to understand anything – relationships, childhood – you will miss it. You will not understand. “Do not put forgiveness in an earthly frame.” You can’t understand what is right or wrong in a relationship based on bodies or psychology – you will be wrong! Whatever I am doing right now has nothing to do with my childhood. If I do use it as an excuse I’m using my childhood as a scapegoat so I can escape responsibility for what I’m doing in my mind right now.

• You can’t understand relationships from the level of the body, and the worst thing is you will think you do understand.

• What keeps the ego thought system going is that we don’t know there’s an ego thought system. What preserves the ego thought system is not being aware there is an ego thought system in our minds. We see it all around, but not in us. So we don’t look, and it is preserved and continually regenerates in sickness, suffering and judgments. We can’t change something we can’t see.

• What makes us so critical and intolerant of others is that we are repulsed by our own sinfulness. We are repulsed by our sinfulness because we think we will be punished, and we are attracted by the sin because it acknowledges my identity… but we are now attracted to it in other people, and attracted to being the victim of that sin.

• When we project we think we get rid of our sin, but we harbor it inside which means I am never at peace; it keeps gnawing at me.

• Nothing is going on here, and what seems to be going on here doesn’t impact our minds.

• The Course is just pretty words to us because we are so enamored of ourselves. If we ever let this in we’d be totally changed.

• The most honest thing we could ever say is, “I am terrified of remembering I am a mind.” We need to learn that everything I do in the world is running away from my mind. If I’m not a sin, what am I running away from?

• We have no idea of the tremendous release and deep peace that comes when you know you are a mind. Not only does the mind expose the ultimate lie of the ego, but it contains the love of God.

• We have to abdicate the insane notion we understand anything.

• You don’t have to analyze a dream, you just have to open your eyes and awaken, and the way you awaken is by giving up judgment, and the way you give up judgment is you want to. You don’t have to give up judgment, you’re just asked for the little willingness that you’d like to.

• To go to the mind does not mean you go to Oneness, you go to sameness, and sameness does not say that there’s nothing here. You say everyone here is a mind. Going straight to Oneness would be too frightening.

• We are not asked to change anything, or to scare ourselves to death, we’re just asked to look gently and patiently.

• We wouldn’t be experiencing ourselves as a body in the world unless we had that ego self-love.

• We’re so in love with the ego that we’re willing to keep experiencing death (of peace), and all of its symbols, ending with the death of the physical body, rather than let go of my love affair with the ego. From the ego’s point-of-view the body, a chocolate sundae, a lot of friends, a nice car, picnics in the park, are all “to die for”.

• Over time, as we recognize more and more clearly what the ego brings us, we will lose our investment in it.

• We make suffering ennobling. We think suffering is helpful, or gets us something, or somewhere. It’s only helpful if it teaches us we don’t want it.

• The attraction to anything (being valued, approved, liked) but Jesus is the attraction to guilt, pain and death.

• We say we want to be happy but we want it on our terms, and underneath the idea of me, and my terms, is the idea of lack and guilt.

• When we want the respect of others it’s because we don’t respect ourselves. When we want the approval of others it’s because we don’t approve of ourselves.

• Guilt motivates all that we do as egos.

• We fill our lives with people and chatter to try and undo the aloneness we feel.

• We want to blame our pain on our aching head (for example).. this is no different than blaming our emotional pain on another person. All pain comes from pushing love away.

• We’re not asked to give up the “I”, just to be trained to think differently.

• If I think the Course is asking me to give up something here then I’m saying the Course is saying there is something here. It’s not.

• The motivation to forgive should be, “This way of thinking is hurting me!”

• It takes a tremendous amount of effort to maintain the ego’s way of thinking, the ego thought system. At some point we won’t be willing to continue to pay the price.

• The Course didn’t show up in the past 30 years, it has always been in the mind – the thought of Atonement has always been in our mind, the Course just gives form to that thought, a thought that will be expressed in many different ways for many different people.

• To keep the focus on a person or problem here is how I keep the problem, because it’s the way I push away my mind, which is where both the problem and its solution reside.

• The ego takes every beautiful experience of release and says “I know how to use this.” E.g. It joins in with everything we do, including our study of the Course, and says things like, “I’m not doing this right. I’ll never get this. I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve peace. I need to push myself harder. I should…….” Anytime there is a “should”, it’s coming from guilt.

• The ego is very good at imitating the Holy Spirit.

• We don’t learn to understand (that’s positive) so much as we learn to undo the confusion (undo the negative). The confusion we undo is our self-identity, namely that we are the home of guilt.

—

Specialness: An Idol of Idiot-Worshippers, February 14, 2009

• It’s very silly to keep worshipping something (special love idols) that won’t pay off. Each idol will fall and each one will seem to justify your anger or disappointment, and you will go from idol to idol to idol.

• Everything in this world is an idol and the only hope is to see it for what it is. We made the external idol so we could hide the internal idol we chose in our mind so that we would not choose against it.

• The only real idol is the ego thought system. We bend down and worship it. Pay it homage. You are both the idol and the idiot worshipper because you are worshipping yourself. (Idiot is not used in the pejorative; think “silly”.) Use every idol here to get us back to the idol we’ve chosen in our minds, and choose against it.

• The only thing of value here is the reflection of love (forgiveness). If you really want to send a Valentine’s card and a box of chocolates, send it to your true teacher: You. The decision maker. You are both the problem and the answer. Ego is a symbol for the decision maker choosing the wrong mind. Jesus is a symbol for the decision maker choosing the right mind.

• It feels so good to hate (be angry, victimized, betrayed, sick) because in that moment I believe I’ve gotten rid of my guilt, and that feels wonderful… that once again I’ve gotten away with murder. We revel in our misery because it proves I am innocent.

• Special love is a thin veil over hate. Hate is hate regardless of the form it takes. And special love is always a set-up because I want people to fail me, because if they fail me then the guilt lies in them and not in me.

• As a student of this Course you must be willing to learn the fundamental teaching: I am a mind and not a body. Do not approach this Course from the world’s point-of-view, as a body! This Course does not exist in the world because there is no world and no you in the world. This Course is a right-minded symbol in the mind, and ideas leave not their source. The source of the Course is the thought of the Atonement in everyone’s mind. It’s a myth that Helen wrote the Course. The Son of God’s right mind wrote the Course. It’s the Son of God’s right mind that studies the Course. It’s the Son of God’s right mind that will awaken. Use the symbol of the Course, but do not confuse symbol with source. Read the Course with your mind. ACIM is a book that can’t do anything for you unless you use it as a symbol that gets you back to your decision maker. Don’t use the Course to make sense of things here. Nothing makes sense here. You can only understand this Course not through your head but through your heart (mind). You cannot understand this Course if you think it’s about you. If you make this Course about your body it will not work, you will not find the peace of God.

• You are living out, in symbolic form, decisions your mind is making. And every time you think something here is important, you have fallen prey to the ego’s deception again.

• This Course does not have secret levels it keeps from you. There are levels you keep from you.

• We need to come to see special relationships as they are: an attempt to shift responsibility for a decision we have made.

• I’m afraid of war / poverty / pain / death… this is a blatant lie! We – are – not – afraid – of – anything – here.

• There is a world out there solely for me to project the repository of unwanted thoughts in my mind.

• Everything is meant to keep us mindless.

• There is not even a God, at least not in the traditional sense of that word… not one that has a body, that we pray to, that waits for us, or who loves us… because there is no us. In the real world there is no person named Jesus, and in Heaven there isn’t anything (form).

• You’re not a body, and you’re not the thought of evil, darkness and sin that made the body.

• To learn that 2+2≠4 takes a lot of unlearning. You must be willing to question every value that you hold, one being that we live in a 2+2=4 world that can be understood.

• You really need to see and be repulsed by what you’re doing in this world, and all of your special love and special hate pursuits so that you can turn away from it. Jesus isn’t asking us to forgive, he’s asking us to recognize how much we don’t want to forgive, because only then will we find the motivation to forgive. Then he won’t have to ask; we will do it on our own.

• When someone around you stops playing the ego game your ego erupts like never before because they’re breaking the secret vow of specialness.

• We’re not asked to deny our bodies, we’re just asked to deny that our body, or anyone’s body, is telling the truth. If there is pain, there is no God. If 2+2=4, there is no God. Everything here is a lie.

• Saying, “Everything is an illusion” to those who are suffering is the height of cruelty and insensitivity. The practice is not to watch the news and be stoic about it. That’s not the practice. Don’t try to apply any metaphysical idea in the Course when you don’t really believe them. Don’t try to pretend you’re not affected by things. If you think you’re a body you have no right to say, “What war? What plane crash? What death?” The metaphysics give us a framework to show us where we are going, not to be used to deny our experiences here.

• “I am not a body, I am free” does not mean I am to deny my body, but rather just to see it as an idea I want to grow into.

• We’re not asked to give up anger or judgment or sadness, we’re just asked not to justify it. Not to say, “I’m angry because…” That’s the idol! The “because”. To not justify it means you would say, “I am angry because I want to be angry. I want an object to project my anger onto because I’m so afraid of my guilt.” We know we’re going to have judgment, we are just asked not to build a case, to see the problem as it is… to look at it.

• Minds are never affected by anything else.

• Jesus would not have cared on that day if he was crucified or had a beer at a local pub.

• When someone is gossiping and you don’t want to be a part of it, you would first work on your judgment about the gossiper. Why would you be concerned about not judging someone who is not present while judging the person who is there. You let her know you understand how she feels, but with an attitude that doesn’t join her judgment OR make her wrong. Basically, you want to make everyone right. All people really want when they’re upset is to know you understand. Love everyone.

• As long as you want to be liberated from the body you won’t be liberated from the body because you’re saying your body is a prison… which negates the power of the mind. Whatever a disease does to your body, it does nothing to your mind.

• With any holiday like Valentine’s you could use it as a symbol, a way to say “I love you” in an ego-free way, that is also a societally acceptable way. But you would recognize the content of the day is the same as the content of every other day. Let the special day be special in form, but not special in content, and when you become aware that the content is special, that’s what you’d want to ask for help with.

• When we ask for help, this is the answer, this is the help: The world you see is an outside picture of an inward condition. The inward condition is my mind’s decision for the ego. The “I” that is hurting is my mind.

• Everything here is meant to hide the mind. Jesus’ help is simply shifting our focus to the mind. It’s the reversal of projection that is the heart of forgiveness.

• The Valentine’s message to ourselves is that we finally want to be good to ourselves, and return to the mind and choose again.

—

The Heights of Happiness, January 24, 2009

• Play the game, but know it’s a game. Raising children is a game, relationships are a game, growing old is a game, but in the hands of the ego, if you think it’s real, it’s a vicious game. Lead a normal life, just don’t take it seriously.

• We programmed the world to teach us what we wanted to learn, and no matter in which form we learn it, the lesson is always the same: that mindlessness is reality.

• If our goal is to reach the heights of happiness then we must be willing to climb each rung, which equates to recognizing the world is not what it seems, and that everyone is the same. How can I get to the heights of happiness if I’m not willing to learn what will get me there? So the practice becomes: Practice noticing how you want to make differences real, and then forgive yourself.

• Whenever we seek to understand someone we’re attacking them. ‘You’ve done something terrible, now I want to understand why you did it.’ And if you’re ’spiritual’ you want to understand so you can ‘forgive’ it. All you have to understand is everyone has the same problem, the same diagnoses: Son of God, separated type.

• If I truly care about someone I don’t subscribe to their dream, which means I set aside my secret wish (I exist but it’s not my fault) so that I don’t take their secret wish seriously.

• In this world we think that being right will make us happy. What is being right? That I exist and that I am at the mercy of forces beyond my control. We have to learn that this is not the heights of happiness, but the depths of despair. The only way up is to resign as my teacher and ask help from a teacher who does not take us seriously. The Course provides one, that’s why we don’t listen to him. We pray to a Jesus that takes us and our problems very seriously.

• People who are happy about the new president are not happy about the new president, they’re happy the old one is gone. That’s not a loving thought. To mock someone is not a preference, it’s an investment, which means you don’t want to enter Christ’s presence. It’s not a sin, but it is something you’d want to look at and forgive. You realize you’re not ready to go Home, but you are ready to look at your ego. That’s practical.

• To get from the ego’s heights of happiness – which is to glorify specialness – to Jesus’ heights of happiness is to embrace the means: that the world I see is an outside picture of an inward condition, and the inward condition is my mind’s power to choose.

• Question: How do I know if I’m in my wrong mind or right mind? You know you are in your wrong mind if you are making differences / separation real. In my right mind I don’t care about any of that stuff. All I need to know is: Am I, in this moment, seeing others different than me or the same as me?

• If you want to analyze your sleeping dreams, that’s fine, – we have to deal with symbols here – just don’t take them seriously.

• If there’s a passage in the Course that you don’t understand, just skip it. The same thing is said again and again.

• You never win any battle because even when you win you’re making the ego real.

• Question: I want a glimpse into what the Real World would be like, but I don’t have any success. How do I get a glimpse? Holding onto judgments is a way of keeping you from knowing what it would be like not to be you, so instead of trying to imagine what it’s like not to be you, work on the judgments.

• Jesus doesn’t care what you do with this Course; he only cares that you give up judgment and not see differences.

• Seeing everyone as the same doesn’t mean you don’t get angry or anxious. You just don’t justify it, which means you don’t blame it on someone or something other than your choice. You recognize nothing out there affects me, only my thoughts. So your focus leaves the external. You stop giving power to anything other than your choice, and then you forgive your choice.

• When specialness disappears your self is not far behind.

• The joy of life is recognizing you are not here, that I am on a journey that will awaken me from the ego. These are the little joys and happinesses that will eventually lead me to the heights of happiness. The ultimate happiness is that this “I” does not exist.

At the end of class Ken said he wanted to finish by reading the final two paragraphs from lesson 157, which he said were some of the most touching lines in the Course to Helen personally. Here are those two paragraphs:

“Today we will embark upon a course you have not dreamed of. But the Holy One, the Giver of the happy dreams of life, Translator of perception into truth, the holy Guide to Heaven given you, has dreamed for you this journey which you make and start today, with the experience this day holds out to you to be your own.

Into Christ’s Presence will we enter now, serenely unaware of everything except His shining face and perfect Love. The vision of His face will stay with you, but there will be an instant which transcends all vision, even this, the holiest. This you will never teach, for you attained it not through learning. Yet the vision speaks of your rememberance of what you knew that instant, and will surely know again” (W-pI.157.8-9).

—

The Mastery of Fear, December 7-9, 2008

• The mastery of fear does not come from doing anything with fear.

• The problem with fear is we think there’s something to be afraid of.

• We make excuses and rationalizations for the fear, but they are all lies. Everyone lies and lies all the time about everything. Don’t believe what anyone says to you about anything, ever.

• We all have ‘compounded psychosis’: We’re afraid something which doesn’t exist is going to hurt our body which doesn’t exist.

• The problem is never – absolutely never – what confronts us in the world.

• The real source of fear is the mind’s choice for the ego. Fear only arises because I have chosen against love.

• The ego wants our attention rooted solidly in the world and fear does that. But don’t make the mistake of thinking there is fear in the mind. The projection of fear is unreal, but so, too, is the thought of fear.

• The basis of all fear is that God will punish me… but GOD DOESN’T EVEN KNOW ABOUT ME.

• Whenever you ask for help, you want to ask: “Who am I asking for help?” (the ego), and “For what am I asking for help?” (the body).

• You don’t overcome anything in the world, you look at it with a gentle smile that says, “This is not what it seems.”

• The problem is not that there is a problem – the problem is that I think there is a problem, and I think there is problem because if there is a problem there is a me. That’s why I love problems; I love the idea of there being a me.

• We like to focus on healing relationships between bodies so we won’t have to heal our mind. If you don’t change your mind, it doesn’t matter what your body does. You’ll just be “making nice” and covering over the ego.

• Watch our for couples who say they have a holy relationship – they don’t understand a word of this Course. They have agreed not to look upon their belief in their unholiness.

• At some point you have to look at all the specialness that is rampant in your life and realize how much pain crucifying yourself is causing you. When you are in enough pain you will become a happy learner. You get to the point where you say, “Yes I am in pain, but this is not acceptable anymore.”

• The way you overcome fear is you choose love. Not as a body or a brain or a personality… as a mind.

• The mastery of fear comes through the mastery of love which means choosing Jesus as our teacher.

• The Atonement has already been accepted; we just haven’t accepted that we’ve accepted it yet.

• You can be sitting in the theatre with Jesus even as you are up on stage acting crazy, or in pain. This weakens your identification with the ego. Healing cannot occur without this part of the process.

• Over time, as you observe, you will become so nauseated at how terrible it feels to attack that the pain will impel you to give it up. The pain threshold is the pain of guilt in the mind but is experienced in bodily terms (physical / mental). Pain can be a good motivating agent – so it can be used right-mindedly, but it did not start that way (right-mindedly).

• The more I experience the discrepancy between watching my dream and experiencing the pain of my dream, the easier it will be to weaken my identification with the body, and strengthen my identification with the decision maker.

• If you have an expectation that people won’t come from their ego, it’s a set-up. Everyone here comes from their ego eventually. It’s much better to expect everyone is going to come from their ego. You want to be totally accepting of what other people do – you don’t have to approve, you can just realize, “What difference does it make?”

• Everyone has an ego. Not everyone does equally bad things, but everyone has equally bad thoughts.

• In this world we can’t help but judge, but we can learn not to justify it.

• Mysticism is the end product, and spirituality is the process through which you achieve it. Mysticism is an ordered movement, its focus is not on climactic experience.

• Schizophrenics are not mystics, and mystics are not schizophrenic.

• Re: using drugs to have an experience that there is more than the body: When you do it artificially there is no way of integrating the experience because there was no process. You have no tools and it puts the emphasis on the experience rather than the process, which reinforces dissociation. An experience is just an experience if it is not integrated. It becomes painful… you see what is so far away from you, and that you cannot integrate it. When a pill or a drug gives you an experience, there is no change. The Course’s shortcut is that there is no shortcut. The purpose of the Course isn’t to have a cosmic experience, it’s to be in the forgiveness trenches becoming less and less judgmental. Having a cosmic experience doesn’t mean you are more or less spiritual than someone else. If an experience ends up with you being kinder, then it’s a valid experience, but if an experience ends up reinforcing your specialness, whether or not it’s valid… it’s not valid. It’s not the experience that matters but if it helps you become more and more right-minded.

—

I am at Home. Fear is the Stranger Here, December 6, 2008

• We feel so terrible about ourselves that we make up a world where we are kings, superior to everyone. Or, we are peasants who are abused by the king. This makes the peasant king because they have power over the king. The weak control the strong. The greatest tyrants are the weak because they get the strong to react. At no time are we roaring more loudly than when we are weak – “Look at what you’ve done to me!!!” And we want the other party to play the gruesome game of guilt.

• We try to keep ourselves in enough fear so that we stay rooted in the world, but not so much fear that we can’t function. We want our pain minimized, but not taken away from us.

• We hold onto our problems because the ego says we’d be worse off without them. Without our anger we’d have to deal with our tremendous self-hate, self-loathing. We use our hate of others as a defense against our self-hate, and we use our self-hate as a defense against Who we truly are.

• God does not know about this world; that’s why it’s safe here.

• The world is a mirror of what I’ve made real in my mind: the conflict between God and the ego. God doesn’t know about it so there’s no conflict. It’s a conflict between my ego and my ego.

• In order for the ego’s plan to work, our attention must continually be riveted on the world.

• We all have an obsession with our own specialness.

• See the world as existing only as a classroom for you to learn to undo your guilt.

• What is repressed makes its way out into consciousness but in disguised forms, in symptoms.

• Instead of trying to understand Heaven / time / how we got here, we should ask, “What does this have to do with my letting go of grievances?”

• See everything you feel that is not perfect peace as purposive.

• Not one of the most learned brains in the world addresses the mind’s decision to dream.

• When we try to explain why we’re upset, we’re all lying.

• I don’t have to know why you choose your ego, just how I decided to react.

• The horrifying thing about special love is how quickly we throw people overboard when they stop filling the slot we’ve made for them. “Another can be found.”

• No relationship is more satisfying than when it is unsatisfying… because then it fills our secret wish.

• If I ask Jesus for help the help I get is not Jesus fixing the situation, but him telling me “the world you see is an outward picture of an inward condition.” We don’t want to hear this so we make up another Jesus – one who helps us in the world, and tells us things.

• If you want to read your own biography, read “The Picture of Crucifixion” in chapter 27 (p.565)

• What will speed you home is being vigilant for when your perception excludes. Everytime you look at a person with anger or judgment, ask, “Is this the way Jesus would look at this person?”

—

Much Ado About Nothing: Everything, Nothing, and Something, November 10-14, 2008

• The problem isn’t the ego (nothing) it’s our belief that nothing (the ego) is serious and something.

• You don’t change the outer forms of your life, you change how you live within those forms.

• Course people are like everyone else, but probably worse because they think they’re different.

• If nothing (the ego) is something, then Everything is nothing. If God is real then something (the ego) is really nothing.

• Question: I don’t want to give up judgment because I’m afraid of the stark raving terror. Answer: You want to see that the stark raving terror is not different than the judgment. They’re both the same defense. So you look at that, too, and don’t make a big deal about it.

• Being in your right mind is independent of what your body is doing, so there are no spiritual jobs. This is a confusion of levels.

• The more time you spend in your right mind the more persuasive it becomes… it feels so good you don’t want to squander the peace anymore.

• Death isn’t a problem, the problem is choosing the ego thought system of death masquerading as life.

• Compromise approach: A. You take the magic, B. You know what you’re doing.

• The ego tells us we are afraid of the power of our mind, that if we ever gained access to it again that we would sin. It’s a lie: We never sinned in the first place. We’re really afraid we would choose the Holy Spirit, and we would disappear. We’re not afraid of crucifixion, but redemption.

• Some people think they will get their salvation from cocaine, and some people think they will get their salvation from helping people who are addicted to cocaine. Both are addicted, one is just more socially acceptable.

• You can’t understand nothingness (the world), but you can understand the purpose of nothingness (to make it something in order to protect you from Everything).

• Beware of people who tell you they and their partner have a Holy Relationship. You can’t have a Holy Relationship between two people who are not there. You can’t have a Holy Relationship between two illusions. You can’t have a Holy Relationship with one person and not another. It’s either everyone or no one.

• What is healthy for every child is to grow up and realize, “I’m no longer my parent’s child.” It’s not that you become aloof, it’s that you are no longer psychologically dependent on them.

• Don’t feel guilty about feeling guilty – that’s just silly. Jesus would be harsh, cruel, and unkind if he asked us to not have ego thoughts. He asks us to look at our ego thoughts. It’s our awareness of our ego that lets it go.

• I’m not saying near death experiences are wrong, I’m just saying they’re not true.

• We try to control behavior so we don’t have to change the mind.

• When you choose the ego as your teacher, you choose guilt as your identity.

• Experience lies. Don’t believe anything you feel.

• Don’t make your life holy, sacred, special. See it as movie, find it mildly interesting, but don’t make a big deal about it.

• Old Roscoe quote resurrected: As long as you think you’re a who, you need a what that looks like a who to teach you you’re not a who but a what.

• In truth there is nothing in the mind, but we believe there is something there, so that is our experience.

• The ultimate expression of “one or the other” is “kill or be killed”.

• The stain of guilt that we can’t wash off is our body.

• You don’t deny what has been done, you deny it has been done to you.

• Forgiveness means becoming mindful. It has nothing to do with what goes on in the world. Don’t put it in an earthly frame.

• The problem is not what goes on in my mind, it’s that I believe what goes on in my mind.

• My entire world is an attempt to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.

• The only right-minded use of this world is to use it as a vehicle to understand the activities of the unconscious mind. What’s the activity? There’s only one: It makes decisions.

• Every thought or feeling that does not make everyone the same is a lie.

• If we don’t look at the ego thought system we will think it’s real.

• What helps you really practice this Course is to begin to experience the pain of not practicing it. If you’re going to learn this Course, you’re going to have to recognize your misery.

• There is no demand to be ego-free; all Jesus asks is that when we do choose the ego that we be willing to look at that decision with him.

• We think we are studying ACIM here, but ACIM is a thought in our right mind. We need a book to represent this choice because we are having a specific experience.

• When people experience the Holy Spirit talking to them – and I’m not invalidating their experience – their understanding of the experience is wrong. They’re important experiences but they’re at the the bottom of the ladder, and we want to get to the top of the ladder.

• Willingness is a synonym for decision. So: “The willingness to be separate” = The decision to be separate (from Jesus).

• One Mind: There is nothing outside of Heaven. Split-mind: There is nothing outside the blue circle (decision maker). The entire cosmos is in the blue circle.

• We believe asking Jesus for help can’t alleviate our anxiety, but we believe a shot of Scotch, or a delicious piece of chocolate cake, or another special relationship can.

• Forgiveness: What we really do is we look at the ego thought system and say, “I CHOSE THIS??” I see it has cost me a tremendous amount of pain, and I don’t want to do that anymore.

• The problems is not your ego reactions, it’s choosing to feel guilty about them. This way, it doesn’t force you to let go of an ego you don’t want to let go of. If i can be matter-of-fact with my ego (this doesn’t mean indulging it) them I’m learning to take it less seriously.

• A special relationship is anything external that makes you feel good. Every special relationship says to God, “Your love is not enough, but this [person, cause, book] is.”

• Self-blame is the same as blame, it just has a different object.

• None of this will make sense. We are talking about a dimension completely outside of our experience.

• The script is written = everything happened in that one instant, both the error and the correction (and all the expressions in thought and form of the ego thought system, and the right-minded corrections).

• Each DVD is an expression in form of thought.

• You choose the DVD depending on the experience you want. The Holy Spirit’s version is the same movie, different experience.

• We’re watching a movie we’ve already reviewed, but have forgotten we’ve watched it already.

• When you really learn a lesson (e.g. abandonment), you erase all DVDs with this theme.

• Everything has already happened, so the only question is why review? Ego purpose: to prove the Course doesn’t work / I am an innocent victim.

• The DVDs are already written, but within each there is tremendous freedom of choice and many variances.

• When you come to an intersection there is no pre-ordination that you’re going to go right or left, for instance. You’ve already done both. There is no pre-destination.

• I’m not responsible for other people’s egos, or what they do, but I am responsible for the situation I am in.

• Once you choose a DVD the only question is which teacher do I want as my companion? If I choose Jesus, he will teach me how to be peaceful, and to see everyone as the same.

• Question: If I eat bad food while in my right mind, would I be sick? Answer: It would depend on what DVD you chose – one where you’d eat and be sick, a little sick, not sick, or die. That doesn’t matter. If it does, you’re giving form a reality it does not have, because you are afraid of the content. If you are in the right mind, you might be sick, not sick, or die, but you would be peaceful.

• I don’t have to understand why a DVD is playing (I couldn’t understand the hologram anyway, and how one thing affects another), just that I chose it. And now I can learn to look at this situation without judgment.

• With the ego, I forget that I’m watching a DVD and think I’m living it.

• When you feel you want to change your script in form all you’re doing is falling into the subtle and vicious ego trap of making the error real, because you have no interest in changing your mind.

• We always choose for two reasons: 1) to reinforce, or 2) awaken from the dream. Say, “This is my choice, this is my classroom, and I can choose a new teacher.”

• You can make changes in form – that’s not a problem – just try and not be invested (i.e. your peace of mind) in them.

• Without a doubt you keep what you learn, but it’s not linear. We don’t die and then carry on – that’s linear. Your learning stays but you can’t measure it in sequential time. Spiritual progress is not horizontal, it’s vertical.

• The Secret is based on the idea that the body and world are real, and that there are things in the world you want. You’re not a body and you don’t understand what’s best for you. What’s best for you is your Atonement path.

• When you realize you’re no longer here, all the DVDs disappear.

—

Making Love More Manageable, November 9, 2008

• Managing love is getting Jesus out of the Real World and into the physical world; asking him for specific help. We displace his love into the world. If we can do something “spiritual” in the world, then all the “better”. That’s when we really manage him.

• We want to manage ACIM because we’re afraid of its vastness.

• God doesn’t hear words, nor does Jesus. We want a specific God to help a specific me with a specific problem in a specific way at a specific time.

• This is the message of ACIM: Boys and girls, there is a top of the ladder. What carries us up the ladder is our dis-identification with the body and the re-identification with the mind.

• As we grow with this Course our relationship with Jesus changes. We no longer relate to him as a problem solver. He becomes a symbol that reminds us that we’re the problem solver.

• We don’t want the body to be satiated, we want the mind to rest in the Quiet Center, in the Stately Calm Within.

• We all have different experiences. We all hear Jesus, just in different forms. Don’t make a big deal of the different forms.

• The only meaningful question is: How do I awaken from the dream? How do I let go of barriers? The answer will always be some form of forgiveness, some shift in perception. What could the answer be but your remembrance of Him?

• The formula for healing is to see the face of Christ in your brother and awaken… which really means to forgive yourself. That loving perception then extends to your brother.

• When we ask Jesus for specifics we’re changing him just like we changed the Son of God at the beginning. Give a child a piece of chocolate and they will want it (specifics) all the time.

• The only purpose of the world is to dislodge our identity from a body to the mind.

• Either you see every problem as the same or every problem as different, which means they require different answers. There is one problem and one answer.

• Real kindness is to see everyone is in pain, and that they deserve the forgiveness they feel they don’t deserve.

—

Trust Not Your Good Intentions, October 5-7, 2008

• Well-intentioned people see the problem outside their mind and then proceed to attempt to solve the problem / save the world / be the savior of the world. It’s not a bad thing, it’s not a sin, but it’s not helpful in healing the mind.

• The true well-intentioned person consistently chooses the miracle, chooses to learn to forgive, chooses to have Jesus as their teacher.

• I can assure you Jesus does not care what happens with this Course. He knows the Course is not external, and that there’s no world out there the Course is meant to heal.

• This is a Course in cause (decision maker/mind) and not effect (world). We look to effects, Jesus looks to cause (the mind’s decision for the ego / identification with sin). It’s very counter effective to ask Jesus for help with the world.

• Gradually the mind becomes more and more in the foreground and the world more and more in the background.

• Once you choose specialness the world exists solely to reflect your specialness.

• It’s healthy for kids to develop a sense of individuality that is independent of their parents, but it’s healthy in a world of insanity and change. And when they’re ready they will choose to unlearn it.

• In this world love is looking without judgment.

• Question: It seems the world is in spiritual speed-up, that the Sonship is lightening. Is this so? Answer: There’s been a lot of information coming through since the 18th century, but the problem comes in when you try and make sense of it. It pre-supposes you understand, could understand, what is happening. Time is not linear, it’s a hologram (which doesn’t exist), so trying to understand something from within time is impossible. You don’t progress one generation to another, or one lifetime to another. What anything means, or why anything happens, nobody knows. Why the Course came in the 60s, nobody knows. The wisest thing is to say, “I don’t know, but this is my spiritual path and I can do it now.”

• Question: Why did you choose to teach? Answer: It just seemed like the right thing to do. I didn’t particularly choose it, it just kind of happened… and here I am.

• To the extent I am free of guilt to that extent love will flow through me.

• “Trust not your good intentions” – the Course uses this phrase to talk about what we do in the world. You don’t have to question every good thing you do, but it’s a red flag if you feel invested in what you do (e.g. people accepting it), or if you feel good about it (e.g. people telling you how great you are), or if you are identified with the kindnesses you give (e.g. I’m a good person). Truly right-minded intentions result in being a vessel who gives welcome to the truth. If you feel any investment whatsoever, your ego has jumped in. And what most people never want to look at is that if you have an investment in helping other people, then you need people to suffer. It means you’re not really being kind at all. The true need is to be kind to yourself by choosing against the ego and for the Holy Spirit.

• If you’re serious about the Course you’re serious about the correction, which means you’re serious about the problem. The trick is to be serious about the Course without being serious. What we get serious about is the form and we do that because we’re afraid to get serious about the content.

• The right-minded use of the past is to recognize a pattern that helps you understand what you’re doing in the present. It shows you the purpose of the past and the present, and since the purpose has been identified and is the same in each case, you don’t need the past anymore.

• Behavior and powerlessness are synonymous. When I make a big deal about behavior I’m giving up my power. I’m right where the ego wants me.

• Question: How do I know if something was the right choice / behavior / action / decision? In a sense, the question really isn’t worthy of an answer. The real question is: Did I make the right choice in my mind?

• Question: I was in my wrong mind and I suddenly remembered your words and they brought me peace and comfort. Was it you, or the words, or something else that brought me comfort? You were ready to make the choice on the level of mind, but were still too afraid to do it directly, so you needed an external stimulus to be a special agent. As we send out the hungry dogs of fear when we are afraid, so too do we send out “God’s messengers” as external agents to minister to us, to bring back what we had already decided to see. Reading the Course, coming to class, my words, only give form to a decision you’ve already made. The problem then is that we tend to make the external form an idol. We make a big deal about the special agent. We give the external symbol, a power it doesn’t have, instead of recognizing the power is in our own mind. We think someone has something I don’t have myself, which is separating. But so long as we are still afraid we need these forms as an intermediate step until we are ready to accept e are the teacher, we are the physician. The key is to use the forms to get us beyond the forms to the content.

• Helen had a brilliant right mind and a brilliant wrong mind. She was brilliant at creating problems that didn’t exist and then finding solutions that didn’t work. Helen and Louie moved to a hotel when there was a threat there might be an elevator strike. The right-minded thing to do would have been to find out if there was an elevator strike (there wasn’t), but we all lack common sense when we are afraid. If Helen had asked Jesus for help He would have calmed her and she would have had the experience of Him telling her to check to see if there was a strike. Now Jesus doesn’t talk, but that’s how Helen experienced Him. The only way she could relate comfortably with Jesus was to turn Him into a problem solver, because otherwise His love was too threatening. So she needed to spend the day shopping just so she could sit on a sofa and meditate for 30 minutes afterwards. One day she experienced the Voice telling her, “I don’t have to do this anymore.” Her fear had abated sufficiently that she didn’t have to use shopping as a defense. We spent that afternoon with nuns whom we both liked very much, but more importantly, Helen spent the afternoon with her right mind which was much nicer than an afternoon of shopping (defense).

• The goal isn’t to live a perfect life. Don’t be afraid of getting angry, just know why you’re doing it. The ego thrives in judgment, and diminishes in intensity when you don’t give it power (to make you feel guilty).

• The problem is not my ego, it’s my judgment of my ego. The problem is not the barriers (I have placed between myself and God), it’s my judgment of the barriers. Look at your ego/barriers without judgment, and realize you have a need not to let it go. Respecting your need for the ego means knowing it’s going to take some time to let it go. Be kind to yourself with the fear, while also realizing how destructive it is. All of our weeping, the real source of our grief, comes from our belief we’ve lost our right mind and will never get it back; we then displace this grief onto worldly circumstances.

• Abundant willingness is the practicing the little willingness all the time. You’re vigilant all the time but you do it with a sort of gentleness and kindness. As you go up the ladder things get easier and easier, meaning it gets easier and easier to detach from your ego. You demonstrate the little willingness more and more abundantly, and the you that’s watching/observing your ego is the decision maker being right-minded.

—

A Course in Miracles: “The Gospel of Truth”, October 4, 2008

• Guilt arose to blind us from God, and the world arose to blind us from guilt.

• We don’t respond to what is within (our mind’s mistaken decision), we react to what is without (what we judge to be other people’s mistaken decision).

• The Course is not addressing those who have Knowledge, and it’s not addressing those whose minds are closed. It’s addressing those in the middle; those who are on the fence/open… those who are not back in the Light but who know there’s something wrong with the darkness.

• So many Gnostics suffered from spiritual specialness, not unlike Course students.

• When something has an effect on me (”makes me” happy or sad) I want it to have power over me.

• Guilt holds the illusion together. When you let it go your world, your thought system, your specialness, your fear, your anger, will just disappear.

• You don’t have to understand the world – that’s making it real. That’s falling right into your ego’s arms. The ego analyzes, the Holy Spirit accepts.

• Any thought that gives a specific thing/person the ability to give you pleasure or pain is a lie. The only pleasure is doing God’s will (forgiving).

• When it comes to the things that distract us in our dream, we can ask, “What does this have to do with the peace of God? The answer is… nothing! But that’s exactly why we’re obsessed with it. The purpose of is to obliterate the peace of God. We’re afraid of it because there’s no us in it.

• The problem is not the pain in my body, the problem is my giving it the power to take the peace of God from me.

• Our entire lives are empty fiction. So watch yourself making it very serious. Full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. If that is true, then what are we so upset about? We should ask ourselves this constantly.

• It is extremely important to recognize that we don’t want to bring all our fears and disturbances to the truth because we would disappear. We like the Bible because in its story we are something.

• Your pain, pleasure, excitement, ecstasy, is not what you think. What is nothing doesn’t feel. It’s the mind’s decision to make your body seem like it’s feeling something that makes it seem to feel something.

• Belief is the problem, and belief is a function of the mind, not the brain.

• You must really examine what your motives are: (1) to reinforce sleep, or (2) wake up from the sleep. It can only be one of these two categories. If you are upset by anything its purpose is to reinforce sleep, and you know you are listening to your ego’s teaching that the world is real.

• Re: politics. The real election is do I vote for my ego or the Holy Spirit as my teacher – then you will know whoever you vote for doesn’t matter. The only vote that matters is the one in my mind. There is only one candidate who really loves us and He is in our mind.

• How can the recognition the world is nothing be despairing unless you thought you could get something from it? That the world is nothing, offers us nothing, is not a despairing thought, it’s a joyful thought.

• It doesn’t matter why something happened (again: was either (1) to reinforce sleep, or (2) soften my belief in the dream), or why I chose it, all that matters is how (with whom) I chose to see it now. See this choice every single moment in your day, then stop and say, “There is another way to look at this.” And it doesn’t matter what you chose, for the statement says, “I’m the dreamer and my dream is not true,” and that’s all we’re asked to see.

—

Truth Makes No Compromise, August 24-26, 2008

• “Truth makes no compromise” means there are no answers in the world. The way you make no compromise is to look at how much you don’t want Jesus’ answer. You don’t do, you undo.

• The question isn’t “How do I preserve this self?” it’s “Why would I want to preserve this self?” Special relationships are hateful and painful.

• The problem is not what we project onto, it’s the projection.

• Children are insufferable, selfish, manipulative, and bratty because they are panic-stricken. They made a wrong turn and are here again. That’s why they’re bratty and selfish. It doesn’t excuse it, but now you know where it’s coming from. The same is true of adults. This way we don’t see them as different from us.

• Does it mean anything to have a lot of trauma and suffering in your life? Does it mean you are spiritually advanced? On your last lessons? No! That’s specialness. There’s no way of knowing, understanding or judging someone’s or one’s own path. All that matters is I can choose peace now.

• Jesus is different than us only to the extent that He will teach us that we’re not different.

• Being authentically spiritual means seeing everyone the same. Being sweetly (egoically) spiritual would involve anything that is separating. An example of being sweetly spiritual: Someone telling you the Holy Spirit told them what you should do with your life, and they say it with conviction and compassion.

• If everything right-minded is undoing, you first have to know what the ego has done. Before you can apply the solution, you need to know the problem.

• If someone is choosing their ego they are afraid of love, and since when did that become a sin?

• Jesus doesn’t give opportunities for healing, he just explains the ones that are there.

• Jesus’ help is looking at the ego without judgment and fear.

• Love is covered over by hate, and hate is covered over by special love.

• Focus on the wrong-minded perception rather than imposing a right-minded perception on yourself. If you can stay with that without judging it, What you are will tell you of Itself.

• The cause of every fear is the fear of remaining in the mind.

• The purpose of the effect is to conceal the cause.

• Respect the fear under someone’s seriousness, just don’t get taken in by it.

• Nothing important happens here. The only important thing that happens here is the opportunity to reverse your projection.

• Victim and victimizer are the same, and are present in each other, it’s just that in any given situation one will seem more dominant than the other.

• You can’t be in your wrong mind and know you’re in your wrong mind.

• There is an arrogance in feeling shame over the separation. It shamefully boasts, “I did something.” You didn’t do anything.

—

“When in Rome…”: Being Faithful to One’s Classroom, August 23, 2008

• The meaning of “When in Rome” is that when you’re in a strange place you should do as the locals do. That would be wise and considerate. And since we’re all in a strange place, that same idea normally holds true here as well.

• Do I see the world as victimizing me, or do I see the world as a projection of the teacher I have chosen?

• Your job isn’t to know what to do, but to forgive your ego judgments and specialness and investments.

• You can victimize my body, but you can’t victimize the love in my mind.

• The worst thing you can do is see something on the news and say “It’s all an illusion”. You don’t believe this or you wouldn’t say something so unkind – unkind to others and to yourself.
Make No Illusion Friend, August 9, 2008

• You get to the point with this Course where you will no longer believe the lie even as you are practicing it.

• The whole purpose of the Course is to help us realize we have a split mind and that it is not a sin.

• You are not asked to give up your ego, you’re just asked to look at it.

• The body does not feel – dream figures don’t feel – it’s the dreamer who feels. It’s the mind that “feels”. The whole world is a joke; a magic trick. Our experience of our bodies, as real as it seems, is part of the show.

• What you want more than anything, what you want to keep uppermost in your mind, is that I Want To Go Home. Then you’ll use everything to lead you out of the dream.

• Everyone seeks to be pain-free. What is free of pain? Your body? That’s part of the joke. Pain is only in the mind. Avail yourself of various magicians (doctors, healers etc.), just use them differently; use the magic to be kind to yourself, to undo guilt. But if the goal is to be pain-free, then the pain will come back. So much roots us in the dream instead of helping us leave the dream.

• You would not feel pain and loss unless you wanted it, and you want it because it keeps your ego intact.

• People only choose to be in pain for the greater pleasure of keeping the body and ego thought system alive.

• We love to be excited by things. The Olympics last night showed us that. We like our senses to be indulged. But we have to ask ourselves, Is That My Goal?? To have my senses indulged? Do I want money/health so I can enjoy things here? For 99.9999% of people the answer is yes. It’s love that we want. It’s love that will take us Home. We lose sight of the goal very quickly. We’re very short-sighted. We seek to avoid pain and maximize pleasure. It roots us here. The body is a tyrant. It’s a tyranny of needs. You don’t want to lose sight of your goal; you want to return Home.

• We forget the workbook lessons to let Jesus know we’re still in charge.

• In the workbook Jesus says “This will be the day that you do it,” then we choose not to do it, and say “Jesus failed me again.”

• What it means to take Jesus’ hand is to realize you’re holding another hand. It was not thrust upon you. You took it. In fact, you made it up, then forgot you made it up, and take it because you think it will bring you comfort. it brings you death. We have to realize when we take the ego’s hand we’re leaving Jesus’ outstretched hand empty. He is not a body, his hand is the presence of love in our mind.

• Sickness is the sick belief we can have a friend other than God.

• When you look at your ego you don’t even really give it up, it just sort of dissolves.

• Don’t stop doing all the things you do, just don’t make a religion out of it. Once you take anything seriously, you make a religion out of it.

• The way you do this Course is you don’t do it, then forgive yourself for it, then you’re doing the Course.

—

Awaken Gently and with Joy, July 27-29, 2008

• The ego has no power. How can nothing have power? The only power is the mind’s ability to choose.

• The entire cosmos is nothing more or less than the tiny mad idea taken seriously.

• The miracle has nothing to do with the world; it simply restores to our awareness that we are a decision maker and that the content of our dream is not true.

• Why would a miracle be about a world Jesus says doesn’t exist? That thinking makes Jesus and the Course absurd.

• We hate Jesus. If we loved Him we would be Him. We hate Him because he doesn’t reinforce our illusions. Jesus can’t remind us there is no world if he is part of the world. When we ask Jesus to help us in the world we are asking Him to be part of the deception. When we ask Jesus for specific help we take this magnificent spirituality and scale it down to our size.

• When we’ve had it with nothing working, that’s what Jesus is waiting for. That’s what we’re waiting for.

• Honesty can be a subterfuge for attack. If you want to be honest with someone be defenseless.

• When you get what your specialness demands there is a moment of triumph, but nothing changes. Behind the moment of triumph the terror remains.

• The real bottom line is we want people to betray us, abandon us, and neglect us, because this fulfills my secret purpose: I exist but I am innocent victim. We all identify with the face of innocence, and no one wants to look at the underlying face of the murderer.

• If someone abandons us that’s their issue; I don’t have to make it my issue.

• At some point we want to realize how painful it is to walk around unfairly treated ALL THE TIME.

• The reason this Course offers us a gentle awakening is because it doesn’t ask us to do anything differently, just to look at what we are doing: I exist, but it’s not my fault, I am the face of innocence. If you look (without judgment) it heals because it can’t be the ego looking, so you must be choosing the right mind more and more, which is healing.

• We just see how much pain our wish to be unfairly treated has caused us and is still causing us. We’re never asked to let it go, just to look at it without judgment.

• The gentle dream is not giving up judgments, it’s not judging ourselves when we don’t want to give up our judgments.

• What helps us to change our mind is to look gently upon what we’re doing, and this helps us see everyone is the same. That’s the gentle dream.

• If there is no world, I can’t blame my experience on the world.

• All perception of differences has their root in sin and sinlessness, which comes from the idea I am separate and different from my Source.

• There is no inner and outer voice. There is only inner voice. Both the voice of the ego, and the voice of the Holy Spirit are us. So why, when we hear our inner voice, do we think we know it is the Holy Spirit? Do you not think the ego speaks with authority? It made the world, so it can manage to sound authoritative.

• Be very careful when you hear an inner voice. A good rule of thumb is to be very, very careful if the voice is specific. Specifics can be helpful, but the voice of the Holy Spirit leads us beyond specifics. Specifics make the error real. You don’t want a Jesus who answers your specific prayers, you want a Jesus who will help you awaken from the dream. This voice teaches forgiveness and shared interests.

• If you always rely on a voice (e.g. Jesus) that is outside of you, you won’t grow up spiritually. It’s our voice. If we don’t realize that we infantilize ourselves and become reliant on a special relationship with the Holy Spirit who becomes like a Santa Claus figure to us. We need to deal with specifics, but we want to get to the top of the ladder. Specifics are a trap; they mire us here. We make Jesus, this Course, and the inner voice special. Begin there, but use this Course to get to the top of the ladder.

• Our problem is we make hearing an inner voice a big deal; we make it special. It’s ordinary. We make an altar to it; we use it to set us apart from everyone else. The Holy Spirit knows only one word: sameness. If I hear the Holy Spirit and you don’t, that’s not sameness.

• We want to make a big deal about hearing the Holy Spirit’s voice because that keeps it separate from me which keeps God separate from me which is what I want.

• It seems spiritually mature to listen for the Holy Spirit’s guidance. It is immature. The Holy Spirit wants us to be Him. That’s spiritual maturity.

• If Helen wrote such a magnificent book from a non-specific voice and still got specifics wrong, why would you have such faith when your inner voice offers specifics? Be wary of specifics. The inner voice is incredibly convincing.

• The minute you say, “I hear an inner voice” you’re lying, because there is no I.

• Irresponsibility is a hallmark of the ego. Kindness means not using the body or the world to hurt myself.

• Jesus’ explanation of level confusion contrasts the mind and body, e.g. undoing the level confusion of sickness. Ken’s level confusion contrasts Truth and illusion as level one, and then from within the illusion contrasts the right and wrong mind as level two. Level two is the relatable, practical level of the Course.

• The ego is 100% hate. It does not diminish. The Holy Spirit is 100% love. It does not diminish. We all have a decision maker – that’s where the change occurs. We choose the ego less and less.

• A big mistake Course students make is that if someone is sick, has a physical symptom, they assume that person chose their ego. There’s no way to know.

• If your goal is to get Home, the condition of your body will become irrelevant.

• Intellectualism turns to experience by practicing seeing everyone as the same. These are gentle dreams.

• The way that I accept the Atonement for myself is that the I that I think I am practices seeing sameness, and as the perception of differences disappears, my guilt and anger and fear disappears, and as these disappear, I disappear.

—

Expanding One’s Scale to the Course, July 26, 2008

• When you ask for specific help you’re saying you’re here. This entails a large amount of assumptions that limit the answer. (The ego is alive and well and now I need help with its problems.)

• This Course is about the love between the letters, words, and sentences; it’s not about our intellect.

• This Course does not address the physical/psychological self, it addresses the decision-making part of the mind that thinks it’s a physical/psychological self.

• Specific prayer works, but it has nothing to do with Jesus, the Course, God, undoing guilt, or awakening from the dream. It’s not that you shouldn’t ask Jesus for specific help, anymore than you shouldn’t eat dinner when you’re hungry. Just don’t think it has anything to do with healing.

• When you ask Jesus for help you’re really asking your decision-maker to choose the right mind. But it’s helpful, as long as I think I am a body, to think there is a separated entity to help me.

• The purpose of the Song of Prayer is Jesus telling us we want the whole song, not the parts.

• The Course came from beyond Jesus. That it came from Jesus was Helen’s experience, but it came from beyond specifics, from non-specific love.

• Right-mindedness is the idea that the world is what it is, but what does this have to do with me?

• Give the Course a blank mind and let it write itself on your mind. Every time you read the Course, read it for the first time.

• Feelings lie because they say “I have a body and it feels something.”

• No one can disrespect me but myself.

• You can’t learn or understand the Course from the level of the body.

• What gets you beyond the experience of being a body is realizing we are all the same.

• Whenever you have an inner experience of pressure when it comes to doing this Course, know that it’s not Jesus or the Holy Spirit. They don’t believe in time.

• We are playing out, on a projected stage, a drama that is going on inside our mind. Just notice this.

• Prayer is the process of forgiveness.

• If frightened people can be vicious then viciousness comes from fear, not from evilness or sin.

• Pleasure and pain are the same because they serve the same purpose: they make the body real. Pain and pleasure feel very real because they were made by the mind to feel that way.

• In terms of practical application, the illusion isn’t that I’m not here, it’s that something here can affect me.

• For a lot of Course students we have the experience that projection doesn’t feel as good as it used to, but not bad enough for us to give it up.

• Just expose the lie. That’s all.

• When you are in pain the lesson isn’t “My body can be free of pain.” That makes the body real. The lesson is “I can be peaceful instead of this”, that this is not what it seems, that I have a choice.

—

To Be Or Not To Be: The Specialness of Death or the Death of Specialness, June 8 – 10, 2008

• As anxiety-inducing as death seems, we are enamored of it because it is the central concept in the ego’s thought system, and proves it real.

• What better way to prove we are bodies than death? If we die it means we lived, which means/”proves” we are mindless.

• It doesn’t matter if you love death or fear death; underlying it is the attraction of death. We are in love with death.

• We are attracted to death but our real attraction is to the mind’s decision for the thought system of death. So the problem is not the symbol (the body’s death), but the source (the mind’s decision to believe in the ego).

• Death is just a smokescreen, but it is the most powerful smokescreen in the world. It is important to get in touch with your special relationship with death and learn to see it as a subterfuge for your special relationship with the ego.

• Your conflict, fear, angst has nothing to do with the body (there is no body) – it’s a reflection of your attraction to the ego.

• The only way to have a peaceful death is to realize you are a mind and not a body.

—

The Emperor Has No Clothes, May 18 – 20, 2008

• Course students sometimes like to do external things like ditch their insurance, or leave their keys in their car, to prove they have done the internal work, but if you need to prove anything you have not done the internal work.

• If you don’t respect people’s wrong-minded choices, you will not respect their power to choose differently.

• You don’t have to get into any metaphysical conundrums with this Course, all you have to say is, “Wherever I am I can choose to be peaceful now.” It doesn’t matter why I chose a certain event as my script, all that matters is that right now I am tempted to feel upset, but I could choose peace instead of this. That’s the lesson. Anything else is making it real.

• The fallacy of the law of attraction is that it makes the world very real. It also arrogantly assumes you would somehow know what would make you happy – namely, getting what you want in the world, which is an obvious ego thought.

• One of the big guilt trips society lays on parents is that they have a tremendous effect on their children.

• Who cares if someone is born with a defect? The body itself is a defect.

• In one person’s Atonement path, sugar can be experienced as a toxin, while in someone else’s it is not.

• Don’t stay in an abusive marriage because it will maximize your Atonement lessons. That’s setting forgiveness in an earthly frame, which means you’re coming from ego, which means you have no idea what would maximize your Atonement lessons. And as long as you have an investment in the outcome, you are making decisions by yourself (egoically). You will know what to do in any situation when you are right-minded. You know you need inner help if you think your happiness lies in staying with your wife, or leaving your wife. Living in country A or country B. Leaving job A and taking job B. Ask instead to look at this situation through the eyes of peace and not judgment. Judgment says, “I know what’s best.” Asking to see through the eyes of peace is relinquishing the idea you know what’s best for you. It’s never about what to do in the dream, but rather getting back to the source of the dream, and looking at that with Jesus. That’s always what’s best for you.

• Since we’re too afraid of the direct experience of God (e.g. “God Is”), we need an indirect experience (illusion of forgiveness). It’s the compromise we make where we don’t deny we think we’re a body, but what we do begin to deny is that what your body does has an affect on my mind.

• The indirect approach is to monitor your thoughts and feelings, and any time you have a thought that doesn’t include the entire Sonship, that isn’t a thought of love and peace that includes everyone, then that would let you know you’re choosing the ego. So your entire day becomes one of information gathering. You don’t castigate yourself, you simply notice what you’re doing. This teaches you that you have a mind, and eventually, that nothing in the world can affect it.

• Whatever is unhealed in your relationship with your parents will come up in other relationships. You don’t have to go back to your childhood memories with a derrick trying to dredge things up that might need to be healed.

• Don’t make the mistake of thinking the mind is diseased. It is not diseased, it just thinks it is diseased. If you say there’s a terrible thought in the past I have to get to, you’re making the thought real and the past real. The ego’s thought system is nothing. The ego itself is nothing. There is no emperor. ▪ Scary thoughts and defenses do not rise unbidden. They come because you ask them to come. There was a moment where you felt peace, felt a threat, and in that split second you purposefully choose to make up stories, to make up anxious thoughts, and just as quickly forget that you (purposefully) chose them. That’s part of the ego’s plan/system. We feel like they just came. That we’re a victim of these thoughts that seem to arise out of nowhere. But the purpose of anxious thoughts is to protect us from the Truth. You need do no more analysis than that.

• The purpose of any situation, no matter how it might appear in the world, is to undo the barriers of separation we have placed between ourselves and others, and see shared interests. This becomes the pervasive purpose for everything we do. Don’t force it, just let it come. But there will come a point where it becomes a natural part of your every day… where you’ll begin to see that the only meaningful thing going on in any situation is using it to learn that you and I are not different.

• When we choose our ego we are choosing against love.

• I could not have gotten upset if I hadn’t already banished love from my mind.

• There must be a self-accusation in your mind if you are defensive, sad, upset etc.

• We keep reliving one mistake over and over and over again. The ego likes to make it complex, but it’s really simple.

• Jesus doesn’t want us to deny our feelings, but to realize they rest on nothing.

• It is very humbling to recognize your whole life has been one big ego game.

• What better way of reinforcing the illusion of separation than by inviting Jesus, the symbol of Truth, to acknowledge our dream. To fix it, change, make it better.

• Learning doesn’t occur in the world but in the mind. Learning only occurs in the decision maker whether we are aware of it or not.

• When you fight against your ego you’re giving it a power it doesn’t have.

• The very fact that you agonize about anything means you don’t want it solved.

• If you’re worried about waking up before you die you’re making time real.

• It’s our wrong mind that say this Course is holy, is something. It’s a right-minded symbol that says everything here, including the Course, is nothing. It says we’re not children of nothing (the ego), but everything (God).

• The problem is not what you’re dreaming, it’s that you are dreaming. The problem is never the problem, it’s that you think there is a problem.

• Whatever your problem is, it will be solved when you smile at it because it began when you were serious.

—

Remembering to Laugh, April 28, 2008

• The amount we cherish our independent self is the amount we fear the decision maker.

• Think how tempted you are to take the Course seriously – that is a defense against the Course. The message of the Course is a gentle smile. If you think the Course is serious, then you think the problem it came to address is serious. Don’t take anything in form seriously. The only serious thing was taking the tiny mad idea seriously.

• Don’t turn your back on suffering in the world – you are not laughing at world, you are laughing at world’s lack of power over you. Do not give what goes on in the world the power to disturb your peace. This is what “laughing” means – not quoting the course at sick people, preaching, or turning your back on suffering. It’s cruel to apply Course metaphysics on the level of form if you genuinely believe you are bodies. The metaphysics only apply in the right mind.

• This world screams ‘something happened’. We want the Course to say that the ego is serious, that the Course is serious. Anything in the world that is serious is with the ego. Forgiveness is not serious – if you think it is, then you think there is something to forgive. Forgive with a gentle smile.

• Let all thoughts/feelings be present and ask Jesus to help. Do not deny ego reactions and do not deny how much you want the ego reactions. Freud introduced the theory of resistance with his patients – Jesus has the same problem with us.

• Once you start putting pressure on yourself, that’s the ego. Jesus doesn’t have a watch.

• Don’t skip steps, don’t spiritualize the world or your attitude, and don’t say nothing is happening.

• How can we be angry with someone who is frightened?

• Being in the wrong mind and not judging it is doing the Course.

• We experience Jesus in the dream by translating his loving presence in our minds – it has nothing to do with Him.

• The workbook is magic. Its purpose is to lead you beyond the magic.

• The cause is always a present decision.

• Asking for help with specifics preserves the defense of disassociation – i.e. I am here, Jesus is there.

• The Course wants us to dislodge our attention from the world.

• Being normal doesn’t mean that you think normal, but that you will be helpful without conditions in a normal way. Careful not to use as excuse.

• Victims are victimizers and vice versa, both making others guilty to ‘reclaim’ innocence. If I want to be superior and ‘God’s chosen’, someone has to be inferior.

• The body cannot feel pain, but the mind can make it think it does.

• I only choose to be abused to prove I am different from abuser.

• We complicate everything. Pg. 588 – top. When you react, you’ve forgotten that this is a dream. When we wake up from the nightmare, the reaction stops. Otherwise it is denial.

• We make differences in form significant to obscure the sameness of the content. That other person is exactly the same as you at the level of the mind.

• God’s Son is all form, not just homo sapiens. Form is different, not content. You will be as kind to a table as a person. This makes no sense from the perspective of the world, but the world is insane.

• The Holy Spirit doesn’t see differences: course students/non course students, democrats/republicans, etc.

• How can what does not exist (i.e. the world/body) change? What changes is your thought system.

—

The Grab Bag of Guilt, March 10-15, 2008

• The problem is never the grab bag (the content of the wrong mind, or what happens in the world) it’s why I would want to reach into the bag.

• When the decision maker is in the right mind it becomes an observer (of the ego). We recognize there is something other than the ego to choose, and we become aware of our power as a decision maker. This recognition, when we revert back to the ego, engenders tremendous conflict and pain because we become aware of the threat to our identity, and also because we’re aware of what we’re choosing against. The sense of conflict won’t end until we get tired of it (of going back and forth, back and forth) and choose against the ego once and for all, saying, “I never want this again”, in recognition of the tremendous cost of individuality.

• You have no idea how helpful it is to know what you’re doing. Even if you’re addicted to judgment, don’t fix it, don’t change it, don’t agonize over it. Indulge all your specialness; just be aware of what you’re doing, and that it’s costing you the peace of God. That is extremely helpful information.

• To accept the gifts of God means to look at the ego’s gifts and say, “I don’t want these anymore.” To say yes to Jesus is to say no to the ego.

• We love to be hurt, anxious, sad etc…. it doesn’t feel that way, but that’s part of the camouflage.

• Don’t give people advice based on the theory of ACIM, give it to them based on the love of ACIM.

• Ken told people to not be harsh with themselves, to just do their best, and reminded us of the line where Jesus says, “If you do my will I will uphold it. If you don’t do my will, I will correct it (meaning: you will have other opportunities).”

• To invoke the miracle when you’re in pain is to take the pill without guilt. If you think, “If I was a good ACIM student, I wouldn’t need a pill” then you’re the “worst” kind of ACIM student… (i.e. pushing Jesus away, judging yourself, level confusion, misunderstanding the miracle, form over content etc.)

• It doesn’t matter why you are sick. That’s in the past. To dwell on the why is ego. If i ask Jesus what to do he will say, “Hang out with me”, and then you will know what to do. If you get a flat tire, change the goddamn tire! It doesn’t matter why it happened. now that it has happened it has become a neutral event, and the question becomes, “Am I going to change the tire with Jesus or the ego?” That’s all.

• Don’t pretend you’re spiritually advanced. Spiritually advanced people don’t need this Course. This is a remedial course for spiritual infants. You can’t be taught if you don’t think you need to be taught… if you think you know the answer then you won’t avail myself of the teacher who is the answer.

• If we believe we are a body, we MUST believe we are the thought system (sin, guilt, fear, hate, murder) that made the body. That’s why we’re here. We’re children of hate, not children of love.

• Your grab bag of guilt is your huge reservoir of memories (this is the ego’s use of memory) of how people have sinned against you, even if it was only 5 seconds ago.

• Why do we reach in the grab bag? Because we’ve made sin and guilt real. And the hungry dogs of fear are kept cold and starving for guilt, so that when I need some they will go out and get it and drag it back, screaming, to their master. The ego. Moi. Identified with the ego, that makes me the master of these monstrous mongrels who are on a savage search for slimy sinners.

• To think this world is a nice place is to deny the one opportunity you have to get back to the cesspool in your mind.

• We use special love to numb and cover our guilt/fear and make ourselves feel good; we use special hate to blame and judge to make ourselves feel good. Neither strategy works.

• When you judge/project there is a hangover (effect). It is very, very helpful to remember how sick you felt so that you would be motivated to not go there again. If you can remember there was an effect to your attack then you’d stop and say, “I don’t want the effect.” Jesus uses this simple motivation: “If you forgive, you’ll feel better.”

• “I need do nothing” – the crucial word is need. When we need do something (e.g. be seen as loving, caring, brilliant), it’s coming from our wrong-mind. When we are in the right mind we don’t have specialness needs, and love can quietly move through us effortlessly, in the most loving and caring way for everyone involved.

• Why does it say, “ABOVE ALL, be not afraid”? Because that’s what motivated us to leave the mind, to make up a world and special relationships to hide the error.

• The practical application of “Nothing here is real” is to say, “Nothing here has power over me, to make me happy or sad.” So I look at my choice to allow things to have power over me, and notice this without judgment, forgiving myself for all the pain it has cost me.

• There is no wrong-minded thought system; only a belief in it. When you look at it, it disappears.

• Whenever we do anything here with seriousness we think what our body does, what this person does, what this event does, will affect our mind. Nothing in the world, not even ACIM, can affect our mind.

• We (mistakenly) want ACIM to be about me, not a Course that says there is no me. That’s being truthful and what we must look at.

• Whatever you do with the Course, or with anything, do it, but just don’t care or think it has meaning. This keeps you from having a swelled head or a crushed head. ACIM, this book, is nothing. Don’t fall in love with it; don’t make it into another idol. It’s just a book that is but a symbol of a love that is not of this world. It should not become your life, or an obsession, but be used to help you become kinder and gentler within the context of your life.

At this point the Finnish translator of the Course stood up and asked if she was translating the course for ego reasons, and Ken said (paraphrased, as are all my notes)…. “You translated the Course because it was a form your right-mind took. That’s not to say your ego doesn’t jump in and you have hard days while working on a project. But if you do something because – for whatever reason – that’s just the loving thing to do, then it’s an expression of right-mindedness. You would look at it like this: An inner experience of love impelled you to translate the book, not because you’re doing something for the Finnish people.”

• Whenever you think you’re doing something important, stop. If you think ACIM is important, stop. (Stop, as in: Stop and forgive.)

• Therapists have high suicide rates because they think they’re the therapist. If you do what you do with love, you won’t feel resentment, burn out, have fatigue, or difficulty – it will be effortless. You let love come through you, then you feel a glitch, as everyone does, and you ask for help.

• Forgiveness is looking at the thought, “Anger/fear/specialness is going to get me something today”, and saying, “Isn’t that silly”, and smile. That’s it. The only thing you truly want is the peace of God. That’s the only thing that could ever truly satisfy you.

• See your life here as information gathering about what’s in your mind, and the information is I have a split mind. What’s the big deal? We already knew that.

• Purpose unites us. See this and the end of hell is near.

• When you see a projection (anger, guilt, fear, excitement, ecstasy) of your choice for the ego, simply say, “There i go again”. Do it very casually, which quickly shifts the focus from the “sin” in the other person out there to the “sin” in you, but if you do it casually, you won’t have a sense of sin, and it will evaporate. But you have to realize there is no sin in the person outside you.

• If you think you have to do anything with your mind, or what’s in your mind, you’ve made it real. So all you do is become more aware of the split-mind. I have a right-mind and a wrong-mind, then stop. You’ve fulfilled the function of this Course. The ego’s strategy is not to look; so the way we undo our decision for the ego is simply to look. And looking always implies looking without judgment. That’s all. At some point you will become so tired of going back and forth, back and forth, so tired of the guilt and pain and suffering, that you’ll just stop.

• The real ACIM is the right-minded film of abstract love running through the mind, not the book on the screen.