Hi all, I wanted to bring up a book that has really influenced my personal journey both in waking and dreaming. The book being “A Course in Miracles”. It was one of the original books I read while beginning my spiritual journey. It touches on some fascinating spiritual concepts, including what I believe is a version of illusory form. The book confronts fear head on which I think can be a tough obstacle going down any spiritual path amd it also carries a very heavy focus on love.
While the book uses Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and God in its words, I believe that these names could easily be swapped with any other name that resonates with the reader. It is far different then the bible and I think the takeaway from the book’s concepts are very powerful. That being said, I’m curious if any of you have read it and what your thoughts were on it.
More specifically if you have, have you found any parallels between the book’s teachings and Buddhism’s practice of illusory form? Do you think that the idea of using any name in place of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and God is appropriate(not sure if I’m out of line on this one ← and maybe where I landed on in the book further down answers this - lol!)? What are some of your favorite take aways from the book?
One of my favorite things to do with the book is just to open it to a random place and text then read a small portion. For example just now doing it, this is where I landed.
"Only the eternal can be loved, for love does not die. What is of God is His forever, and you are of God. Would He allow Himself to suffer? And would He offer His Son anything that is not acceptable to Him? If you will accept yourself as God created you, you will be incapable of suffering. Yet to do this you must acknowledge Him as your Creator. This is not because you will be punished otherwise. It is merely because your acknowledgment of your Father is the acknowledgment of yourself as you are. Your Father created you wholly without sin, wholly without pain and wholly without suffering of any kind. If you deny Him you bring sin, pain and suffering into your own mind because of the power He gave it. Your mind is capable of creating worlds, but it can also deny what it creates because it is free .
You do not realize how much you have denied yourself, and how much God, in His Love, would not have it so. Yet He would not interfere with you, because He would not know His Son if he were not free. To interfere with you would be to attack Himself, and God is not insane. When you deny Him you are insane. Would you have Him share your insanity? God will never cease to love His Son, and His Son will never cease to love Him. That was the condition of His Son’s creation, fixed forever in the Mind of God. To know that is sanity. To deny it is insanity. God gave Himself to you in your creation, and His gifts are eternal. Would you deny yourself to Him?
Out of your gifts to Him the Kingdom will be restored to His Son. His Son removed himself from His gift by refusing to accept what had been created for him, and what he had created in the Name of his Father. Heaven waits for his return, for it was created as the dwelling place of God’s Son. You are not at home anywhere else, or in any other condition. Do not deny yourself the joy that was created for you for the misery you have made for yourself. God has given you the means for undoing what you have made. Listen, and you will learn how to remember what you are."