This morning I would like to discuss a concept in the Course that is very frequently misunderstood
and that's joining. The Course talks a great deal about joining with our brothers. And
here as in so many other places, for example, when people talk about forgiveness or the
holy relationship, it is so easy to get off course very, very quickly because our experience
is that we are bodies, we are persons who have chosen not to join with certain people,
our special hate relationships. And then we want to correct them based on what Jesus teaches
us in this course that we want to join with them. We want to join with them in a holy
instant. And, of course, there is nothing wrong with that; and if we look at the image
of the ladder that "The Song of Prayer" particularly talks about, the pamphlet Helen had taken
down after the Course was completed, in fact after the Course was published. The bottom
rungs of the ladder...the top of the ladder being the real world and then beyond the ladder
entirely is Heaven...but the bottom of the ladder represents our experiences in the world
as bodies in which we clearly are relating to other people. And since most of our relating,
as the Course explains to us whether it's in the special love form or the special hate
form, all of our relating tends to be attacking. Even those people we think we love, we are
really attacking them because we want to cannibalize what we believe is in them that they took
from us, and so we want to get from them what will meet our neediness. Well, this obviously
is not joining. And so the whole idea of the Course then is to have us look at people differently.
But because we think of ourselves as bodies, in fact the Course says that we cannot even
think of God without a body, or in some form we think we recognize. Well, we cannot even
think of God without a body, of this course without a body, of Jesus without a body, or
ourselves without a body. And so clearly then through the filter of our perception that
we are separated bodies...that comes from the mind's decision to identify with the teacher
of separation...then clearly we will take what the Course is saying and interpret it, meaning
that Jesus wants us to join with other people. Well, nothing could be farther from the truth,
not that he doesn't want us to be kind to other people, but the idea is to recognize
that this entire course is Jesus inviting us to join with him. That's what this course
is about, and where is it that he wants us to join with? He wants us to join with him
in the mind because that's where he is. There is no body. There is no world. There is nothing
outside of us. Near the end of the text is that wonderful section, "Seek Not Outside
Yourself." Well, you're not going to find Jesus outside yourself. You're not going to
find love outside yourself. You're not going to find salvation outside yourself. You will
only find it within because that's all there is. In fact, actually when you realize there
is nothing without, nothing outside, then the concept of inside or within has no meaning
because it only...that "within" only has meaning when we juxtapose it with "without" and vice
versa. When you recognize there is no outer, then in a sense to talk about an inner makes
no sense because it does imply there is an outer. But the mind is within in the sense
that it's nothing external and so this course then is really Jesus saying please come to
me. If one wants to look back at 2100 years of Christian history, one could point to several
mistakes that have been made from the perspective of the Course. But one of the big ones, in
fact probably the most important one, is that this resplendent figure of light who appeared
in the world was really coming to say join with me, come to me where I came from. And
what the world did, of course, is that we didn't join with Jesus, we invited him to
join with us. And so he became anchored in a body, in a world, and our world is what?
It's a world of sin. So you can't conceive of the phenomenon of Jesus as the Bible speaks
of him and then Christian tradition demonstrates. You cannot understand that if there is no
sin. After all that's why God sent His Son into the world, to forgive us our sin. So
we invited Jesus into our world, a world of sin, a world of separation, a world of specialness,
a world of bodies, and just read the four gospels and read all the epistles. They are
all about the body. I'm urging you not to make the same mistake with this course. This
has nothing to do with the biblical Jesus. It has nothing to do with what the Bible teaches.
They represent two basically antithetical, mutually exclusive thought systems. Don't
make the mistake of thinking Jesus is asking you to join with him in the body. He's asking
us to join with him in the mind. That's why his course is called "A Course in Miracles"
because the miracle is the Course name for the pathway that leads us from perceiving
the world outside to returning it to the world that is inside. The Course says "The miracle
establishes that you dream a dream and that its content is not true." We are not the dream
figure, the body, the person. We are the dreamer. We are the mind. And so Jesus is asking us
to join with him in what he calls our right minds so together we could look at the wrong-minded
dream, its inception in the mind, and then its projection into the world's dream and
realize that this is all just one mistake. It's a big mistake but it's the only mistake.
It's a mistake of substituting the teacher of separation for the teacher of Atonement.
And so it would be very helpful as you work with this material, as you read it and as
you seek to apply the Course in your everyday life, that realize that Jesus is asking you
to join with him on the level of the mind. That's where forgiveness occurs. That's where
healing occurs. That's where joining occurs. And to use our experiences in the world as
the springboard to choose the miracle as the way back to the mind so we could truly be
where Jesus is. That's what this whole course is about.