There's a question that most students ask at one point or another
in their relationship with A Course in Miracles,
and that's what we'll be exploring today.
That's the question, How do I judge my progress?
How do I know if I'm doing this right?
How do I know if another person's doing it right?
How could I tell that I'm doing the Course better than somebody else,
or that I'm doing it worse than somebody else?
Or how could I tell that, how could I judge this?
And obviously, especially the way that I'm posing it,
these are spurious questions and these are really questions that the ego would ask
in an attempt to kind of get us to kind of evaluate our progress
thereby making ourselves special...either especially holy
because we're doing so well or especially unholy
because we're failing.
And these are all thoughts, of course, that the ego blesses.
I've always thought that there is one way, however,
one criterion one can use to evaluate one's progress in the Course, and
I kind of mean that half tongue-in-cheek
but I do think it's a helpful criterion to look at.
And that is when you recognize as you make your way
on this journey with this course...
a journey that I sometimes describe
that we take with Jesus from mindlessness to mindfulness...
as we make our way on this journey
at some point it should dawn on us,
not only from an intellectual point of view because we're told this,
but from an experiential point of view that the "you"...y-o-u
that is addressed in the Course is not the "you"
that we think of ourselves as being.
It's not the "you" that we identify with our personality,
our bodies...not the "you" that holds this book in our hands,
not the "you" that does the workbook lessons,
not the "you" that attempts to put the Course's principles into practice.
But that the "you" that Jesus is addressing
is the decision-making mind.
And when one thinks about it,
especially in light of the Course's overall intellectual thought system,
it has to be that.
Repeatedly we're told that the body doesn't do anything,
that ideas....because ideas leave not their source...the idea
of separation has never left the mind,
and therefore there is no separated world,
which means there is no separated creature.
There is no separated person that we think of ourselves as being.
So how could Jesus be addressing someone
or something that doesn't exist?
He tells us there's no life outside of Heaven.
He tells us that you can't paint rosy lips upon a skeleton
(i.e. the body), pet it and pamper it
and believe it lives.
So he can't be talking about that.
And he tells us the body doesn't choose.
The body doesn't live, doesn't die, doesn't take direction.
It literally does nothing.
So whom is Jesus addressing?
He must be addressing the mind that can choose again.
Over and over and over again we're told
in A Course in Miracles that we have to choose differently.
The very end of the text is "Choose Once Again."
We're told each and every moment...
We're told each and every moment we choose either
to identify with the time that terror took the place of love
or love took the place of terror.
And over and over again,
everything in this course is about decision.
So Jesus must be addressing the part of our minds
that we at the Foundation refer to as the decision maker,
which is simply a term that we use to denote the decision...
the process of decision-making that the mind is involved with.
When the Course tells us the world we see
is an outside picture of an inward condition,
the inward condition is the mind's choosing
either the ego as its teacher or Jesus as its teacher.
So one could almost like chart one's progress in this course
by that one criterion,
again, that when we really know
that Jesus is not addressing us as a person,
but he's addressing us as a mind,
pleading with us to choose again,
to choose him as our teacher instead of the ego,
to choose a miracle instead of a grievance,
to choose to look at our judgments without trying to justify them,
without feeling guilty,
but recognizing that our choosing to believe
in the ego thought system and following its lead
to just judge and judge and judge
and make differentiations and distinctions
that we believe are valid,
that doing this hurts us,
that this roots us still further in the dream.
It roots us still further in the belief and the reality
of our own personhood...that I exist...I'm a person.
I'm the one who has to forgive this other person.
How could that be if there's no person out here?
How could it be if there's no person in here?
There is no person that forgives.
At the end of the second chapter in "The Song of Prayer",
on forgiveness, Jesus says do not set forgiveness in an earthly frame.
In "The Two Pictures," in Chapter 17 of the text he says
you have put the right picture in the wrong frame.
The right picture being forgiveness...the wrong frame being the body...
that's the earthly frame.
He seems to be talking to a person
because we can't even think of God without a body, we're told.
We can't even think of A Course in Miracles without a body.
We can't even think of Jesus without a body,
and we can't even think of ourselves without a body.
So, of course, when we think about forgiveness,
we're going to think about forgiving somebody else,
and the language of the Course is certainly couched in those terms.
But these are only symbols that meet us
in the condition in which we think we are in,
which is a separated, dualistic condition.
So again, our real progress in this course
comes when we cross that line and we suddenly realize
that Jesus is talking to us as a mind.
And when that happy day occurs
our lives will never be the same again,
because nothing in this world will ever have an effect on us.
It will not make us happy...it will not us sad.
It will not reinforce conflict or bring us peace.
Everything in this world will be seen as the same,
as a way of helping us get back to our minds
so we could choose again.
That's the process of A Course in Miracles
and that's why it's called A Course in Miracles,
because the miracle, once again,
is that pathway that leads us with Jesus as our guide
from the mindless world of bodies
to the mindful world of decision-making.
And that is our only hope.