Aside from the usual lessons discussed in A Course in Miracles, there is a vast collection of texts teaching various principles on miracles. In particular, we will discuss chapter two titled, The Separation and the Atonement on the topic of fear and conflict.
The first paragraph says,
“It is possible to reach a state in which you bring your mind under my guidance without conscious effort, but this implies a willingness that you have not developed as yet. The Holy Spirit cannot ask more than you are willing to do. The strength to do comes from your undivided decision. There is no strain in doing God’s Will as soon as you recognize that it is also your own. The lesson here is quite simple, but particularly apt to be overlooked. I will therefore repeat it, urging you to listen. Only your mind can produce fear. It does so whenever it is conflicted in what it wants, producing inevitable strain because wanting and doing are discordant. This can be corrected only by accepting a unified goal.”
For a lot of us who are long term students of the course, we tend to take for granted that Jesus is the person teaching here. This is one of the passages where this comes across quite clearly. He says in the first appearance of his actual voice that, “It is possible to reach a state in which you bring your mind under my guidance without conscious effort.” Jesus is talking about his guidance, and in sentence six, he says insistently, “I will therefore repeat it, urging you to listen.” He's got a quite serious tone here, and it is not usually like this in the course. Typically, we find his tone to be more casual and laid back, offering solutions rather than insistent on them.
The other big reveal here, which speaks to why we focus so much on miracle mindset, is that Jesus is talking about the fact that it is always our own minds that produce fear. This is a big point Jesus is making in this first paragraph, and Jesus wants us to join him in the steps to correct this. “Only your mind can produce fear, and then it does so whenever it is conflicted in what it wants.” In other words, between what the ego wants and what spirit wants for us. The only way to resolve this conflict that leads to fear, is to lean in more closely to the divine, and get unseparated, so that we have a unified goal.
Now the next section gives us the steps to correcting fear:
“The first corrective step in undoing the error is to know first that the conflict is an expression of fear. Say to yourself that you must somehow have chosen not to love or the fear could not have arisen. Then the whole process of correction becomes nothing more than a series of pragmatic steps in the larger process of accepting the atonement as the remedy. These are the steps. Know first that this is fear. So just acknowledging that I'm in a fear state, fear arises from lack of love. The only remedy for lack of love is perfect love. Perfect love is the atonement. “
So again, this is about being mindful. Jesus is coaching us to be mindful of the fact that if we're in a fearful state, then we must pivot from there to the fact that we are also in an unloving state, which is usually the result of having disconnected from divine love or separated from Source. It's like having a bad phone connection or WiFi connection. It stutters, it gets fragmented, it's not smooth, it's not consistent. And so fear is the result of a lack of love, which is usually based on some kind of disconnect from the divine. The only way to fix it is to reconnect with the divine and thus reconnect with the Source of love.
Next, let’s talk about this word atonement. Here in the passages it says that atonement is an expression of perfect love. So atonement generally has connotations of some kind of sacrifice to make things right in religious terms. Perhaps an animal is sacrificed and the blood sacrifice of that animal pays some sort of a penalty, and things are temporarily made right again, until there's another period of atonement when we sacrifice again. In the Christian tradition, Jesus is seen as the main sacrifice, the sacrificial lamb, the one who pays the price for humanity's sin. So for a lot of people, atonement has these connotations of blood sacrifice in order to make a payment for sin.
It's almost like in a forensic model of atonement. In a court of law, you do something wrong, there's some kind of punishment or a price has to be paid. In a lot of religious circles, sacrificing something, killing something, is the payment that is made.
In contrast to the course, atonement makes no reference to any form of sacrifice. In other words, no sacrifice is required. It's simply a technological device that God has made available to us, which if we embrace as a concept and as a practice, puts us back in a pristine condition, no matter what bad things we've done or what mistakes we've made. So perfect love is the atonement.
Elsewhere, the course says that the main task or responsibility of a miracle worker is to accept atonement for themselves. So we are in a constant state of accepting atonement for ourselves and this is the way we get reconnected with God; this is the way we remedy the fear that's cropping up in our minds because we separated from that. So in terms of accomplishing or accepting the atonement, I just wanted to highlight the fact that it might not be as active as we think. It's not like we have to do anything in the physical world. It's more about becoming open and receptive to that perfect love that is always available for us.
This is one reason why the course can be quite appealing to some and not to others: there's a lot of explaining that has to be done. It contains 1,000 pages of this type of theory, and I say that not to either intimidate people or to use it as some kind of spectrum, just emphasizing that it's intricate, nuanced, and detailed. It's really the conceptual acceptance of this that gets the process started for most people, which is that God loves us. God wants to restore us constantly to a pristine state, no matter what deviations we have made based on separating away, and that there's no price to pay, punishment, sacrifice, nor blood to be shed.
So how can love be the opposite of fear?
Let's say that someone is afraid for their life and health; they've just been diagnosed with a terminal illness and they're afraid that they're not going to recover, that they're going to die. They're having all these fears. Very real and logical fears in term of our physical world. The course teaches us that everything physical is ultimately a part of the illusion of life and so the solution to that would be love, which is accepting the fact that God has promised that we can be healed, that everything will be okay, and otherwise we transition to a better place. All of these things that can be embraced just by remembering the love of God can actually silence that fear and lead to the most favorable outcome here on Earth.
If we pivot to the work environment where, let's say I'm working with a CEO or an executive or an entrepreneur, there are so many things that come up on the dashboard of the particular leader that are fear inducing. Is there enough cashflow to meet payroll and all the expenses of keeping a business running, from something that's a small mom-and-pop to something that's a bigger multimillion dollar endeavor, to something that's a multibillion dollar enterprise? There are so many risk factors that a leader has to consider constantly. Not to mention various forms of interpersonal conflicts that occur which can keep a leader up at night just worrying and fretting about what to do about a person who doesn't quite perform up to par. There are so many challenging decisions to sort through and if each decision produces a certain amount of fear under normal circumstances or anxiety, then it can be overwhelming for a leader.
What we're doing with the miracle mindset is constantly trying to start the day off being “plugged in.” Reminding ourselves that no matter the issue, there's a divine solution sourced in love that will make everything okay. That goes for a health issue as much as it does for all the intricacies that a leader in a business or an enterprise is confronted with. So again, so much of the executive coaching work is about supporting clients to keep resetting through this connection to God's love and especially for atonement. Here's a list of all the things I think I've done wrong, or all the things I feel inadequate about, or all the mistakes that I could make or all the things that could go wrong atonement fixes all of them. It smooths them all out through God's love. It's a very powerful concept. If one then is able to emanate this as a leader on an ongoing basis, I think then all the stakeholders pick up on it and perpetuate this on a corporate level.
We typically believe that courage would be the opposite of or solution to fear. In most situations, however, there's really only so much that we can do to solve the problem. There likely isn't enough courage that we could ever singlehandedly muster up in these situations to actually solve the problem at its root. And that's why courage is actually a limited solution to something like fear. But atonement, God's perfect love, is the ideal solution because there are too many circumstances beyond our control, and the source power is the only one that can actually manipulate the environment to get the solution that is needed for us to thrive. So courage can only do so much to create a solution in the 99% of variables outside of our own control. Courage emphasizes human effort. Undeniably it is crucial to be tenacious and fight through challenges. There's a certain amount of that which one has to do against the ego, if the ego is considered to be the adversary. But holistically, it is God's love that will simply dissipate everything of conflict.
In the last few passages, it does bring detail to the fact that this is something passive that you don't really have to do. You just have to accept it and this does tie into a lot of the Christian ideology of accepting being “born again” and accepting of the blessing that God can Grace upon you. It fits in with this idea of “nightmares to miracles.” Because the nightmare concept is about waking up which is the process of embracing divine love. So when we wake up from a terrifying state that we live in constantly, the goal is not to hold on to the nightmare and make it a more comfortable nightmare. The goal is to wake up completely from the nightmare and create the dream we want to live. We consider health, wealth, love, and enlightenment as areas in which we can improve the nightmare. Once we have harness the power of Source to change our life’s nightmares into miracles, we've replaced the nightmare with a happy dream.
In previous months’ discussions, we have used a practical application tool called an inventory, or a list, and in this case I encourage you to create one including a handful of places that feel loveless in your current life. Perhaps you are resistant to expressing love to somebody or you feel that somebody is withholding love from you in some shape or form, and to each instance, very intentionally surrender to what has been encouraged in this lesson, which is to accept God's love and accept atonement for these pain points where love feels withheld.
