17 Jul 2024 Comments Off on Level confusion
Level confusion
An earnest ACIM student asked, “Do I have to give up the ‘me’ that I’ve worked so hard to love?”
Last week a beautiful, earnest question was asked in class about unconditionally loving ourselves, including our dark side. And once we accomplish this hard-earned, unconditional love, are we being asked to give up the person we worked so hard to accept and love?
This is a good example of level confusion. Let’s clarify some points.
First, Jesus loves us unconditionally because we are the same as he is–we are Spirit. We are not asked to love our dark side–we are asked to give the darkness to the Light (the Holy Spirit) and then Light shines away darkness. This is on the metaphysical/spiritual level. Ken Wapnick refers to this as Level One. Level Two is ego mind and the manifest world that ego mind dreams up including humanity and the person you are taking yourself to be.
Second, on the level of the person, all you’re asked to give up is your belief in fear. Jesus advised Helen Schucman (the scribe of A Course in Miracles) to ask him to remove the conditions for her fear–not to ask that he remove her fear. The distinction is that if Jesus were to remove fear, he would be agreeing that the ego exists and that there is something to be afraid of. This is what he calls, “making the error real”.
In Chapter 9, Jesus explains, “When a brother behaves insanely, you can heal him only by perceiving the sanity in him. If you perceive his errors and accept them, you are accepting yours.” T-9.III.5:1-2
Jesus further clarifies in Chapter 12, “You have been told not to make error real, and the way to do this is very simple. If you want to believe in error, you would have to make it real because it is not true. But truth is real in its own right, and to believe in truth you do not have to do anything. Understand that you do not respond to anything directly, but to your interpretation of it. Your interpretation thus becomes the justification for the response. That is why analyzing the motives of others is hazardous to you. If you decide that someone is really trying to attack you or desert you or enslave you, you will respond as if he had actually done so, having made his error real to you. To interpret error is to give it power, and having done this you will overlook truth.” T-12.I.1:1-8
If we drag Jesus down into our dream world, this would undermine our power of decision. We would establish that we are powerless and Jesus holds all the power. But the miracle in A Course in Miracles is meant to jog our memory that we are perfectly capable of choice. We have free will and when we connect our perception of a personal will with God’s Will we realize we are “at Home in God, dreaming of exile.” T-10.1.2:1
In other words:
On the level of the person, you practice forgiveness by choosing to give the Holy Spirit your belief in separation–which results in giving up fear, little by little. This is accomplished within your individual curriculum and may include psychotherapy, 12-step groups, yoga, meditation, athletics, art, working with children, animals or humans-in-need, learning self-love, healing codependency or narcissism, studying conflict negotiation, conscious relationships, active listening, among countless other possibilities.
The forgiveness practice offered in A Course in Miracles Workbook for Students helps you recognize yourself as Spirit (through holy instants and miracles) and no longer identify as the person you took yourself to be. This eventually results in a loss of individual identity, which does not register as a loss because Spirit is Whole and the belief in individual identity which seemingly ruptured that Wholeness is no longer believed in.
Connect with Amy