Update: 7/24/16 This is part one of A course in Miracles by Marianne Williamson.
The original video was taken down so I uploaded the next best one regarding the topic.
Notes below were from the previous video.
This is part one of A course in Miracles by Marianne Williamson.
The introduction to the book contains the following summary:
- Nothing real can be threatened.
- Nothing unreal exists.
- Herein lies the peace of God.
Nothing real can be threatened, nothing unreal exists. Here within lies the peace of God. This is how a course of miracles begins. It makes a fundamental distinction between the real and unreal, between knowledge and perception. Knowledge is truth under one law… the law of love or God. Truth is unalterable, eternal, and unambiguous. It can be unrecognised, but it can not be changed. It applies to everything that God created, and only what he created is real. It is beyond learning because it is beyond time and process. It has no opposite, no beginning, and no end. It merely is.
The world of perception on the other hand is the world of time, of change, of beginnings and endings. It is based on interpretation, not on facts. It is the world of birth and death founded on the beliefs and scarcities of loss, separation, and death. It is learned rather than given. Selective in it’s perceptual infancies, unstable in it’s functioning, and inaccurate in its interpretations.
From knowledge and perception respectively two thought systems arise which are opposite in every respect. In the realm of knowledge, no thoughts exist apart from God, because God and his creation share one will. The world of perception however is made by the belief of opposites and separate wills in perpetual conflict with each other and with God. What perception sees and hears appears to be real because it permits into awareness only what conforms to the wishes of the perceiver. this leads to a world of illusions. A world which needs constant defense, precisely because it is not real.
When you have been caught in the world of perception, you are caught in a dream. You can not escape without help because everything your senses show, merely witnesses to the reality of the dream. God has provided the answer. The only way out. The true helper. It is the function of his voice, his holy spirit, to mediate between the two worlds.
He can do this because while one the one hand he knows the truth, on the other he also recognises our illusions but without believing in them. It is the holy spirit’s goal to help us escape from the dream world by teaching us how to reverse our thinking, and unlearn our mistakes.
Forgiveness is the holy spirits great learning aid in bringing this thought reversal about. However the course has it’s own definition of what forgiveness really is just as it defines the world in its own way. The world we see merely reflects our own internal frame of reference. The dominant ideas, wishes, and emotions in our minds. Projection makes perception. We look inside first, decide the kind of world we want to see, and project the world outside, making it the truth as we see it.
We make it true by our interpretations of what it is we are seeing. If we are using perception to justify our own mistakes; our anger, our impulses to attack, our lake of love in whatever form it may take, we will see a world of evil, destruction, malleolus, envy, and despair. All this we must learn to forgive not because we are being good and charitable, but because what we are seeing is not true. We have distorted the world by our twisted defences and are therefore seeing what is not there. As we learn to recognise our perceptual errors, we also learn to look past them or forgive. At the same time we are forgiving ourselves, looking past our distorted concepts, to the self that God created in us, and as us…
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