Today we're going to continue with "miracles," the theme for this year. It's a great theme and in the past we've done themes like "forgiveness," "meditation," "atonement," "light," "peace," and "love." All of these are different topics we've done in the past and they all support miracle mindset. So the rationale of this show is to provide additional material that supports everyone's miracle mindset development. And that's an important designation. It's different from having a "positive mindset" or having a "growth mindset" as opposed to a "fixed mindset," which a lot of people may be familiar with. We're very intentional about "miracle mindset." So let's just jump right into Miracle Principles 31 to 40.
In these principles today, I want to make note that Jesus refers to Himself twice in Section 32 and Section 37. Now allow me to explain. In Section 32, Jesus says, "I inspire all miracles which are really intercessions. They intercede for your holiness and make your perceptions holy. By placing you beyond the physical laws, they raise you into a sphere of celestial order. In this order you are perfect."
Then again in 37 Jesus says, "A miracle is a correction introduced into false thinking by me. It acts as a catalyst, breaking up erroneous perception and reorganizing it properly. This places you under the atonement principle where perception is healed." It is pretty amazing to see in ACIM that Jesus is referring to himself. We've talked before about the fact that for a lot of us who are students and teachers of A Course of Miracles, it's a given that this was all shared by Jesus through the scribe, Helen Schucman. So she's the person who wrote it down, but it was all dictated to her. It's a pretty amazing thing to think that just on its own without the Jesus part, it's a pretty interesting set of teachings about miracles. Then when you add the fact that the Jesus who showed up to 2000 years ago and taught everything he taught and did the miracles he did, is referring to Himself now and saying when I came 2000 years ago, this is what I taught, but people didn't understand it.
I always get a big kick out of Jesus referring to Himself periodically. He doesn't do a lot, but in these two places here, it is pretty cool for somebody who might be a geek about the Jesus factor here. Now, I'll hasten to add that for a lot of people, it is absolutely blasphemous that Jesus is showing up somewhere that's outside of the Bible, because the Bible is the only place and maybe a few other very carefully vetted sources where Jesus can possibly show up. Not to get too far in the weeds, but it's good to know what some of the opposition is and for instance, people even go so far as to say that this book is just a demonic source that's pretending to be Jesus and spoke through this woman, telling her it was Jesus and to write everything down. The counterargument to that is of course that this text is so full of love, peace, forgiveness, and healing to that point that it's hard to see what a demonic influence would be trying to gain. Why would a demonic influence teach something that's so aligned with everything that Jesus was teaching anyway?
Moving on, we all know that in Biblical Scripture there are a number of amazing things Jesus did miraculously: he walked on water, he walked through walls, he fed the multitudes, he healed people who were blind, he restored. He did endless miracles in conventional Scripture. Jesus was kind of the linchpin but claims to reappear to continue teaching on the things he did 2000 years ago.
In section 33, Jesus says, "Miracles honor you because you are lovable. They dispel the illusions about yourself and perceive the light in you. They thus atone for your errors by freeing you from your nightmares." Anytime I see the reference of nightmares anywhere in ACIM, which is what inspired the title somewhat subliminally for my book. In this text, he is basically saying that miracles are a sign of divine love that show us the part of us that's perfect, that has no flaws. There's nothing wrong with this spiritual part of us and if we can make a connection with the spiritual part of us, then we will be able to manifest miracles within a simulation, a matrix that seems very troubled and very disturbed with a lot of vengeful experiences, painful experiences, destructive experiences.
So the whole point of atonement, as Jesus refers to it, is to tap into a corrective or healing device that flows out of God's love for us and requires no sacrifice. Typically atonement, as I've mentioned before, is connected to blood sacrifice. Something has to be killed in order to make up for the mistakes that are being atoned for. And of course in miracles, there's no requirement of sacrifice or blood sacrifice specifically. Atonement is just like - and I hate to trivialize it by saying this, but it's almost like - cosmic bleach. You just open up that bottle of bleach and pour it on whatever's disturbing you in your own life. In the world that we're looking at a war, mass murders, racial injustice, whatever it is. If we just invoke this "bleach," it cleans and cleans and cleans. That's what Jesus is basically saying. A miracle is evidence of the fact that cleaning of some kind has habit through this love, divine love. Ultimately this is the message of freedom and release from something that was gripping us in a painful way.
Now moving on to more content from my book, Nightmares to Miracles, in chapter three. This chapter features An Integrated Model of the Psyche. Everything is very carefully constructed to fit together. There are so many layers, it's easier to read about it and then discuss it. There are many moving parts to this model. There are layers pertaining to Freud and Jung who are two sort of giants of contemporary psychoanalysis, and created the foundation for most psychoanalysis and psychotherapy of a psychological nature.
There are three different color-coded areas to the model of the psyche. There's a red area, there's a blue area, and then there's a green area. So atonement pertains primarily to this blue area in the psyche. This blue area represents the unconscious part of our minds, unconscious meaning that it's hidden from awareness. Therefore what's in there on the individual level and the collective level is not really known to most human beings and it's not really that accessible. The reason it's not accessible is because of this horizontal line, which represents what we could refer to as a barrier of repression. The malicious ego deliberately uses to keep us blocked off from the baggage we're carrying. This baggage represents all of the traumas, difficulties, and pain points we've experienced since we were born, but at a deeper kind of collective unconscious level. It also contains things like global cataclysms, wars, genocide, famine, pestilence. It includes the collective human experience, like a human internet of every human experience.
Now the real interesting thing about putting all of this together with ACIM is that what we perceive physically in our environments is what's coming out of the subconscious. What we see in the physical world is a projection of what we are carrying unconsciously. This also jives well with quantum physics which is really fascinating. So when we say atonement, what we're doing is cleaning this up. We're deleting this negative programming here on the individual and collective level and therefore getting a different outcome in life or "movie" projection. The "movie" is actually so different that you can flip it to the other side. It's like switching the channel from a horror movie to like, a nice Hallmark movie. Peaceful, loving, kind and gentle. So the right side is the horror movie and the left side do you want to involve this green stuff is the cleaned or atoned version, as we do the practice of atonement. So that's one aspect of this integrated model of the psyche: true atonement, which is cleaning without sacrifice.
The other two things I want to highlight are what I refer to as true forgiveness in ACIM. True forgiveness has to do with the external world we see and is best exemplified by a lesson like Lesson 23, which says, "I can escape from the world I see by giving up my attack thoughts." So let's say somebody does something that annoys me, irritates me, offends me, and I have deep resentment toward. I become engaged in true forgiveness by saying that I'm giving up the attack thoughts I have about it. It's a little bit like watching a movie which is a projection of our own unconscious thoughts and then when we get upset with it, we're actually getting upset with our own unconscious thoughts that are being predicted out, including the people who are offending us in the movie. Of course, the miracle mindset is trying to get us to detach from that and not really give it credence as much as get it to disappear. So the way we do that is by relinquishing any attack thoughts we have. For example: I can escape from the world I see about this horrible traffic situation by giving up my attack thoughts about unpleasant drivers or nasty drivers (or whatever it is). So that's true forgiveness.
Finally we have true prayer. True prayer is about making contact with the divine. It's not about petitioning as much as it is about merging, taking the conscious part of our minds and getting through all of these obstacles that we have been complicit in introducing into the mind and really making connection to the source of love. Once we do that and do it as a consistent practice, we live in a state of flow with miracles all the time.
In summary, there is true prayer, which is merging with the divine, true atonement, which is allowing the love of the divine to help us dissolve the fear, guilt and anger we are sitting on unconsciously which is also producing our nightmarish experiences in the physical realm, and then the way that the practice of habitually dealing with the physical realm is to basically disclaim it by all kinds of different principles and teachings and mantras.
Now taking a look at the two barriers of repression, which is a concept that is found in Freud's work. It has to do with all the defense mechanisms that Freud came up with and studied and it was very expert and articulate about projection, displacement, reaction, formation. These are all very technical terms about how the conscious ego cannot deal with the more horrifying aspects of what's going on in the mind. So it has all these shields that it creates. Now of course, in miracles presents us with a different ego. It's more malicious in intent. So the malicious ego's intent in having this barrier of repression, which I think Freud was getting parts of. It wants to keep us in the dark about what we really need to fix. So that if we are unaware of what we're really carrying, then we project it outward and then we attack things that are outside of ourselves, which keeps us in a very kind of almost "Groundhog Day" like experience so that we don't escape from the root cause of the problem and that's the ego's agenda: to keep us in a trap.
In the second barrier of repression, Carl Jung was intuitive about this block. The block here is to the divine. The ego is now creating a buffer, a block from our making connection with the divine. For Jung it's a bit ambiguous, it's not so malicious, it's just part of the defensive apparatus. And Jung at times in his writing goes so far as to say God has a shadow side and it has darkness in it and it's blocked off from knowing things fully, which I don't agree with, by the way. I think it's a flaw in his thinking and he was projecting his own kind of flawed thinking onto the divine. So I'm tracking like two sort of giant psychoanalytic theorists and clinicians and their approach to these barriers of repression. They kind of give us the language, the technical language.
Our goal is to disarm both barriers of repression. If you do it in an unregulated abrupt way, that can be destructive, it can lead to psychosis. There would be too much of the unconscious stuff that's just bubbling up and people don't know how to regulate it and they're just suddenly crazy, and maybe they really are kind of mentally off balance and sometimes people are in touch with things they're saying and nobody wants to listen to them, but they're not actually crazy. There's a lot that goes on with stuff bubbling to the surface here. The last thing I'll say that if people are in touch with this part, the pathology of it is that people can have a God complex. They may think that they are God because they're merged with God, but that's not what we want. We want to understand that we are tapping into the divine power which we have access to but we are not ourselves.
This can also bring up the topics of psychedelics and nootropics, which are some of the many ways that people may choose to break barriers of repression. Everyone can choose what methods they feel comfortable with, but in next month's episode we will dive into solutions that are recommendable for dealing with this integrated model of the psyche. You can look forward to a deeper discussion on this topic in next month's newsletter, but today, I hope you have gleaned a new perspective on the psyche as it pertains to a miracle mindset.
