“That which we are, we shall teach, not voluntarily, but involuntarily. Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened. Character teaches over our head.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay “The Over-Soul”, 1841
“To teach is to demonstrate. There are only two thought systems, and you demonstrate that you believe one or the other is true all the time. From your demonstration others learn, and so do you. The question is not whether you will teach, for in that there is no choice. The purpose of the course might be said to provide you with a means of choosing what you want to teach on the basis of what you want to learn. You cannot give to someone else, but only to yourself, and this you learn through teaching. Teaching is but a call to witnesses to attest to what you believe. It is a method of conversion. This is not done by words alone. Any situation must be to you a chance to teach others what you are, and what they are to you. No more than that, but also never less.” -A Course in Miracles
The
betrayal of the Son of God lies only in illusions, and all his "sins"
are but his own imagining. His reality is forever sinless. He need
not be forgiven but awakened. In his dreams he has betrayed himself,
his brothers and his God. Yet what is done in dreams has not been
really done. It is impossible to convince the dreamer that this is
so, for dreams are what they are because of their illusion of
reality. Only in waking is the full release from them, for only then
does it become perfectly apparent that they had no effect upon
reality at all, and did not change it. Fantasies change reality. That
is their purpose. They cannot do so in reality, but they can do so in
the mind that would have reality be different.
It
is, then, only your wish to change reality that is fearful, because
by your wish you think you have accomplished what you wish. This
strange position, in a sense, acknowledges your power. Yet by
distorting it and devoting it to "evil," it also makes it
unreal. You cannot be faithful to two masters who ask conflicting
things of you. What you use in fantasy you deny to truth. Yet what
you give to truth to use for you is safe from fantasy.
When
you maintain that there must be an order of difficulty in miracles,
all you mean is that there are some things you would withhold from
truth. You believe truth cannot deal with them only because you would
keep them from truth. Very simply, your lack of faith in the power
that heals all pain arises from your wish to retain some aspects of
reality for fantasy. If you but realized what this must do to your
appreciation of the whole! What you reserve for yourself, you take
away from Him Who would release you. Unless you give it back, it is
inevitable that your perspective on reality be warped and
uncorrected.
As
long as you would have it so, so long will the illusion of an order
of difficulty in miracles remain with you. For you have established
this order in reality by giving some of it to one teacher, and some
to another. And so you learn to deal with part of the truth in one
way, and in another way the other part. To fragment truth is to
destroy it by rendering it meaningless. Orders of reality is a
perspective without understanding; a frame of reference for reality
to which it cannot really be compared at all.
Think
you that you can bring truth to fantasy, and learn what truth means
from the perspective of illusions? Truth has no meaning in illusion.
The frame
of reference for
its meaning must be itself. When
you try to bring truth to illusions, you are trying to make illusions
real, and keep them by justifying your belief in them. But to give
illusions to truth is to enable truth to teach that the illusions are
unreal, and thus enable you to escape from them. Reserve
not one idea aside from truth, or you establish orders of reality
that must imprison you. There is no order in reality, because
everything there is true.
Be
willing, then, to give all you have held outside the truth to Him Who
knows the truth, and in Whom all is brought to truth. Be not
concerned with anything except your willingness to have this be
accomplished. He will accomplish it; not you. But
forget not this: When you become disturbed and lose your peace of
mind because another is attempting to solve his problems through
fantasy, you are refusing to forgive yourself for just this same
attempt. And you are holding both of you away from truth and from
salvation. As you forgive him, you restore to truth what was denied
by both of you. And you will see forgiveness where you have given it.
ACiM/Text/Chapter
17
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