Does the Course teach that only some groups of people are worthy of love ? Q #936: A few years ago, my brother got involved with a Unity Church and now he wants to be a minister. He has also studied A Course in Miracles for the last two years. Recently, he told me that he thinks the Jews contributed nothing to world society before Jesus came along. He stated, Its very cut-and-dried, the Jews were warriors and never promoted peace, love, and brotherhood. That all started with Jesus. I am dumbfounded by his view and know he is hugely misinformed. Are his statements representative of Unity Church? Is this what the Course teaches? A: While we are not affiliated with Unity Church and therefore certainly not experts on it, in our experience, the attitudes you have described are in no way representative of its teachings. As for A Course in Miracles , its central purpose is to help us undo our faulty belief that some of us are more capable and worthy of love than others. It seeks to help us realize that we all play the same game. We tell ourselves that another person or group is the guilty one, but this is a cover for our hidden belief that the guilt is in us. Deep down, each of us knows we play this game. And the only way we could know we are playing it (and indeed play it at all) is by having two opposing thought systems in our mind. These are the thought systems of the ego and the Holy Spirit. The ego is a thought system of 100 percent hate. It seeks to maintain our individuality and existence no matter whom it has to attack in the process. Its motto is kill or be killed (M.17.7:11). This does not usually look like physical murder. It more often looks like judgment -- the ongoing murderous condemnation in our minds of our fellow human beings. In terms of our own spiritual growth, we need to know that it makes no difference whether we are condemning an entire race of people or the individual who just cut us off on the freeway. When we make a judgment about a person or a group that we would not apply to the whole Sonship, we are reinforcing our own guilt and self-hatred. We are ensuring that we remain asleep with our belief in this painful world of separation and death intact. This is true no matter how justified our judgments might seem. This does not mean we should not recognize unkind behavior, or, for example, hold criminals accountable for their actions. It simply means that we should do so without hate. It also does not mean that we should deny or suppress our less than loving thoughts. Rather, the Course asks us to become more and more honest about them. By actually looking at them, we can finally stop projecting them and begin to take them less seriously. Jesus sums up the entire process of being a Course student in this one simple statement: All that is needed is you look upon the problem as it is, and not the way that you have set it up (T.27.VII.2:2). Our eyes will always tell us that we have many problems in this world and the source of them is outside of us. But we set up a world, a body, and a brain to convince us that this is so. We can only move beyond our pain by saying to ourselves, maybe I am wrong. The process for doing this is to turn to the Holy Spirit in our mind and ask Him to help us look at all our judgment, anger, and hatred honestly and without guilt. The Holy Spirit is our memory of Gods Love. The Course teaches that we are still at home in Heaven, joined with our Creator. But we had a tiny, mad idea that we could be separate. This idea provoked guilt, which caused us to fear retribution from an angry God. To escape from that, we fell asleep and dreamt up this world. And so our goal from the beginning was to make a world in which we would see the lack of love in everyone but ourselves. And yet, despite this goal, we retain the memory of Gods Love in our mind. At any moment we can turn away from the ego and toward the Holy Spirit. He will tell us that The problem of separation, which is really the only problem, has already been solved (W.pI.79.1:4). It has already been solved because it does not actually exist. The problem is only in our mind and so is the solution. This same dynamic -- the conflict producing coexistence of the egos and the Holy Spirits mutually exclusive thought systems -- has existed in the mind of virtually every human being who ever appeared to live in this world: Jew or Christian, Muslim or atheist. Jesus is the Western worlds most potent example of one who chose to hear only the Holy Spirits Voice. But the choice he made is available to all of us. Our job therefore is to make that choice. Whether others have made it is not our concern (and in fact, there is no way for us to know since we cannot know what is going on inside another persons mind). If we find ourselves trying to make determinations about how spiritually advanced another is, we can be sure it is simply a tactic of our ego -- brought on by our own fear - - to keep Gods Love away from us. And when we get caught up in all of this silliness, the Course can help us return to sanity by reminding us that You do not believe the Son of God is guiltless because you see the past, and see him not. When you condemn a brother you are saying, I who was guilty choose to remain so. You have denied his freedom, and by so doing you have denied the witness unto yours. You could as easily have freed him from the past, and lifted from his mind the cloud of guilt that binds him to it. And in his freedom would have been your own (T.13.IX.4:3,4,5,6,7). facimoutreach.org/qa/questions/questions188.htm#Q936
Posted on: Fri, 29 Aug 2014 12:09:36 +0000
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