This afternoon we're going to be talking about the attempt on
the ego's part to reconcile the irreconcilable.
This thought actually can be found very clearly enunciated in the
Psychotherapy pamphlet where Jesus talks about
the place of religion in psychotherapy in which he says
that formal religion has no place in psychotherapy.
And then he adds it also has no place in religion...
meaning that once you formalize a religious belief,
it stops being what it truly is,
very similar to the famous statement attributed to the Buddha
when he says what are known as the teachings of the Buddha
are not the teachings of the Buddha.
Once you put something in form,
it ceases to be what it truly is.
So the message of A Course in Miracles then
is beyond the form, which is why I always encourage people
when they read the Course to read it as they would read a great epic poem
that let the words, the symbols, the metaphors speak to you
instead of trying to impose an intellect on it.
But in that passage, in that place in the Psychotherapy pamphlet
where Jesus talks about religion, he talks about the attempt to
formalize religion is an attempt to reconcile what can't be reconciled.
In other words, it's the attempt to displace the content
and put it onto the form,
and that's what we're all trying to do. So, for example,
one might say as a student of the Course,
I'm a very good student of the Course because I do the lessons diligently.
Or something that Gloria and I would hear
often in the years when we were traveling
around the country, around the world, people would say,
oh, I know A Course in Miracles. I did it last year.
And what they meant, of course, was that they had done the workbook
and so feeling they had completed the workbook
meant that they had done the Course
And that would be an example, again,
of confusing form with content.
In fact, if one had truly done the workbook,
one would remember that right at the end Jesus says
this course is a beginning, not an end.
And basically once we understand what the Course is teaching
and once we go through the one-year training program
that the workbook gives us, we then spend the rest of our lives
with our teacher, the Holy Spirit or Jesus,
putting into practice day-in and day-out what the lessons are showing us,
what the teachings of the text are showing us.
In other words, how to practice forgiveness
from the moment we awake to the moment we go to sleep,
and actually into our sleep as well.
But when we put something in form
and then we get involved with the form of it,
that's an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable.
Form and content don't match.
In the text which is a real attempt to correct
what from the Course's point of view
is a fundamental misunderstanding of the line
that comes in John's gospel...In the beginning was the Word,
the Word was God, and the Word was made flesh
and dwells among us which, of course, is talking about Jesus.
And in the Course, Jesus says that's impossible.
The Word, meaning Spirit in that context or Christ,
can't be made flesh because the two are irreconcilable.
Spirit and flesh, as Jesus says near the end of the text,
don't go together.
You either know the Spirit or recognize flesh but you can't do both.
It's that kind of all or none or one or the other mentality
that the Course uses to help us recognize
the difference between truth and illusion.
Jesus tells us vision or judgment are your choice
but not both of these.
We are either minds or we are bodies.
We either look through the eyes of the ego's judgment
or through the eyes of the Holy Spirit's vision,
but we can't do both.
When we try to do both, that's reconciling the irreconcilable.
That's when we say, for example, or think A Course in Miracles is a book.
In fact, it's a set of three books,
and then people tell the story of how the Course was written,
how Helen scribed it and that becomes fact.
Well, it's not a fact, it's a myth
because anything in this world is a myth.
We're told not to confuse symbol with source
so when we talk about how the Course was written,
when we talk about A Course in Miracles as a set of books,
these are symbols.
The source, which we are not to confuse the symbol with,
the source is the message,
and the message comes before words.
The message is the love which is truly the source of the Course
and is what the Course is.
But when we get caught in the form
and then we feel some things have to be done with the Course,
when we get caught in rituals whether they are rituals
of the religions we grew up with or the rituals
that have already begun to happen with the Course itself,
then we are confusing form with content.
Not that there's anything wrong with doing things behaviorally
because we have to as bodies,
but we don't want to be deceived by what we're doing.
So when Jesus tells us in Lesson 184 that we use the symbols
of the world, not because they're true
or because we believe in them
but because this is how we communicate with each other.
He's saying use the symbols, use A Course in Miracles in form
but don't be deceived that the Course is the form.
It's how we live our lives, how we demonstrate the principles
of the Course that's important,
not the principles in and of themselves.
Remember, words are simply symbols of symbols
and therefore they are twice-removed from reality, as the manual says.
So we want to use the words of the Course to get to that reality
beyond the words.
So in that way, we don't attempt to reconcile form and content,
body and mind, but we use the body, we use the form
as a way of getting back to the mind.
We use the symbols to get back to the source
and that's what we identify with,
and that's what will make us true students of A Course in Miracles.