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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
A Course In Miracles
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If you recognize you need do nothing, you have withdrawn the body’s value from your mind… To do nothing is to rest, and make a place within you… Into this place the Holy Spirit comes… there will always be this place of rest to which you can return. And you will be more aware of this quiet center of the storm than all its raging activity. This quiet center, in which you do nothing, will remain with you, giving you rest in the midst of every busy doing on which you are sent… It is this center, from which the body is absent, that will keep it so in your awareness of it.
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On the homepage, in the very first paragraph of prefatory comments, I offer the despairing opinion that much of the Course might never be deciphered. And while there might be some truth to this statement, as one proceeds through the Course, it would seem that certain keys of understanding are suddenly placed in one’s hands. These keys unlock many doors of apparent confusion, and, when this happens, vast tracts of former incoherence suddenly take to themselves a harmony and clarity.
One of these keys is the “quiet center.” I came across this term near page 400 of the “Text” of the Course. Prior to this, almost 200 pages, much of what I read and skimmed offered me little understanding. However, with “quiet center,” I began to perceive a linkage among a large number of previously-encountered runic concepts. My understanding was not suddenly perfect by any means, and much indistinction remained, but “quiet center” became a kind of lynchpin bringing and holding together a certain unity of thought.
The Course presents many hard-to-understand precepts, to the effect: “you have no enemies”; or “there’s nothing to forgive because the offence never happened”; or “in the holy instant all illusions fade away”; or “great effort on your part will not improve your spirituality”; or “your task is not to seek for love”; or “you are not two selves in conflict”; or “let the Holy Spirit’s purity shine away sinful thoughts”; or “there is no guilt for any of the sons of God”; and many similar counter-intuitive statements.
And yet, once we perceive the meaning of certain keys of understanding, large sections of the Course become accessible to us, in a beginning way.
The “quiet center” – also referred to as the “inner altar” or “inner light” or “internal teacher” and other metaphors – is one’s true self, the sacred soul linked to God.
No matter how much wickedness one has engaged in, none of this can touch the soul. It remains inviolate. All of the bad things that people do occur within the domain of the “false self,” the “ego” – which is not a real self of ours at all, in that, it’s but a shadow of a developmental stage, on its way to something else – and this is why the Course says that, strictly speaking, we do not have two selves in conflict.
And because the bad things that people do are prompted by the ego, and not our real selves, the sacred soul, the Course boldly asserts that there’s nothing to forgive; in that, our real selves never engaged in any wickedness.
The Course wants us to know that we will make giant strides in our spirituality once we see that, fundamentally, there is no guilt for anyone. It’s just the ego on a rampage, a part of us that is passing away and must not be confused with any substantial aspect of ourselves. The way to reduce its influence is to “shine it away” with focused awareness. This focusing of consciousness is the “holy instant,” a timeless moment of clarity in which we see all things from God’s perspective.
Once we remove the ego’s influence, love naturally bubbles up, from the inner true self, into the outer sphere of personality. Love was there all the time; of course it was, as the sacred self is pure, is part of God’s own essence, is not guilty of the least offence, and has never engaged in anything that is untoward.
All of the sons and daughters of God are sinless. Totally sinless. Only confused, unwell, and spiritually insane. But there is healing.
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