You are with me.

God being “with” me is such a simple idea. Yet when we are talking about someone we love, “with” is the best idea there is. It is the opposite of separation, and therefore the opposite of loneliness.

You are my Source of life, the life within.

I take this to mean that the very essence of my being flows from God and is God’s Being. As a result, my very life, my vital principle, the light of my existence, is God’s. It is something I constantly receive from God. I am not a clay figure fashioned by His Hand, so that afterward I exist on my own. I am a stream flowing from His spring.

You are the air I breathe.

This does not mean that air is really God. It means that God is my real air. God is my oxygen. My real being breathes that oxygen all the time, and thus maintains itself. My current mind gets only little sips of this oxygen, which is why I am always gasping for air.

You are food by which I am sustained.

Again, this does not mean that physical food is really God. It means that God is my real food. Just as my body has a primal need for food, so my being has a primal need for God. Just as food is what sustains my body, so God is what sustains the real me. And in God, this “food” is a free, abundant, and never-ending feast. If I really let myself live in this feast, I would never need any other food again. God is only food I really need.

You are the water which renews and cleanses me.

This refers to two key functions of water in our experience. Water renews us when we are thirsty and water cleanses us when we are dirty. But water really only renews and cleanses our body. Imagine God as the water that really renews us. Imagine God as the water that really cleanses us. God is our true water, just as God is our true oxygen and our true food.

You are my home, wherein I live and move.

Air, food, and water are things that sustain us, in whatever environment we live in. In this line we find out that God is our true environment. Just as our body lives in a physical house, so our being lives in the house of God. Our real home is the sanctuary of God’s Heart. And there, as the Course points out many times, we feel truly at home, something we never manage to feel in any home in this world. There, we can endlessly relax.

You are the Spirit Which directs my actions, offers me Its Thoughts, and guarantees my safety from all pain.

God is also that parental presence who guides, illuminates, cares for, and protects us in this uncertain world. We normally think of that function as being the Holy Spirit’s, and it is. But in this line, God is the Holy Spirit. As an extension of God, the Holy Spirit, you could say, is just God in another form. Therefore, any gratitude we have toward the Holy Spirit, any trust in Him and reliance on Him, is simltaneously felt toward God. By relying on the Holy Spirit we are leaning on the Arm of God.

You cover me with kindness and with care,

I love this image. It’s a brief line buried in the middle of the paragraph, but it speaks volumes. Imagine God covering you with kindness and with care. Try to imagine that this is not just flowery metaphor but really is the case. Lesson 50 mentions “a blanket of surety and protection,” so you might imagine the covering as a blanket.

…and hold in love the Son you shine upon, who also shines on you.

The Course has many images of God embracing us. I think these are only partly metaphorical, for an embrace needn’t be physical. You can be embraced by someone’s mind, by someone’s love. Likewise, “shine” is not just a physical thing. A person can shine on another, by “beaming” approval onto that other. So imagine God holding you in His loving Arms, while shining His full approval on you. They say that infants are born able to see just far enough to see, from their mother’s arms, their mother’s looking down on them. For an infant, the need to see that loving gaze while being held by the mother is just as primal of a need as air, food, and water. Perhaps it is for us, too.

If you were really held in God’s Arms while He shines His love and approval on you, what could you possibly do but shine back? And what greater joy could there be than that mutual shining?

How still am I who know the truth of what You speak today!

If I really listen to God, I will feel the above scenario in everything He tells me. His words will be what carries to me the food, air, and water of His presence. Therefore, when I hear His words and know the truth in them, what can I feel but perfect contentment? And in that contentment, what can I be but absolutely still?

The weird thing is that, while both are essentially accounts of spiritual awakenings, they are really quite different. The Advaita people speak of a radical shift in which they realized that, as it is sometimes put, “there is nobody home.” They had identified themselves as separate beings, but now they saw that reality does not consist of individual beings, but rather of limitless “Presence.” The result was liberation from the awful anxiety of being somebody. The worry fell away, the self-concern fell away, and were replaced by endless peace. To use my words, it’s as if personhood itself is inextricably bundled with suffering, and so the goal is liberation from personhood and all its ills, liberation in “the Emptiness.”

The near-death experiencers, on the other hand, tell a very different story. They often meet a God who is boundless, formless light. Many even merge with this Light. But rather than the picture being about the dissolution of personhood, it seems to be about loving persons in perfect relationship. NDErs are often told they have to return to earth to learn unconditional love, so they can permanently unite with an unconditionally loving God. They are told that all that matters here is our relationships, how we treat others and feel toward them. There is an acknowledgment of oneness—with both God and others—but it is a oneness that is also the union of beings who are in relationship.

It is easy to focus on the commonalities between these different sorts of awakening. After all, people on both sides are feeling liberated from a constricting identification with the separate self. They are experiencing a merging with some greater oneness, and an accompanying state of indescribable peace.

But I am also struck by the differences. The Advaita people say very little about love, about relationships, about God, about being sent on missions to help others (which the NDErs routinely talk about), and about becoming more loving people. Instead, they talk mostly about their own inner journey and about the state of peace and bliss they have awakened to. They key thing is not so much what they do, but what they feel. In their interviews, we learn very little about their relationships and quite a lot about their inner state.

In my mind, the key difference lies in the notion of personhood. What are we? Are we persons who are inherently one with others and with the ultimate Person—God—but have identified with our separateness? Or is personhood itself the problem, the illusion, the knot to be untied?

How we answer those questions profoundly determines our view of reality. It also determines how we see the goal of life, and how we measure progress toward that goal.

For instance, imagine an awakened Advaita teacher having an NDE. I can see two very different scenarios. In one, she encounters a typical NDE scene in which God appears as a vast orb of light, accompanied by Jesus and angels and countless spirits. But then she realizes, this is just a mind-created illusion. There is no God as a being; there are no beings, period. She no longer has an ego that needs to be “loved” by God or Jesus or angels. Having realized the emptiness of personhood, she has gone beyond the need for that kind of personal reassurance. The whole scene is just a mirage, just a vestige of her ego’s old mythologies. Realizing this, she has overcome the final hurdle. The scene vanishes, and she herself dissolves into the infinite bliss of the Emptiness.

In the other scenario, however, she has all the same realizations, but in this case, the scene doesn’t vanish. Instead, God commences to guide her through a review of her life. But this review is not the story as she has told it, with it all revolving around the climactic moment of her enlightenment. Instead, it’s a story of how she has treated the people in her life. She discovers that on both sides of her enlightenment experience, she was often unloving, often callous and self-serving. And she discovers that her salvation lay in seemingly insignificant encounters in which she was genuinely loving, moments that in many cases she had forgotten because they did not rate highly in her worldview. Yet despite the evaluative nature of this review, she is not judged. Instead, she feels embraced by God with a love that is intense beyond anything she has experienced. And then God sends her back to earth and tells her, with infinite tenderness, that she can do better.

Obviously, these are entirely different scenarios, and yet each one, I think, makes sense within its particular worldview. Which brings us back to the question, Which worldview is correct? The one centered on loving personhood, or the one centered on liberation from personhood? I don’t think it is a question that we can leave unresolved. We can’t just focus on the common ground; we have to reckon the differences. Even if we decide the truth falls somewhere in the middle, we still cannot hold to both ends at once. Both of the above scenarios can’t be true.

As students of A Course in Miracles, I think we have to resolve where the Course comes down on this question. Is it all about loving personhood or liberation from personhood? There are those who see the Course as coming down on the Advaita side. In such a view, all the language in the Course about God, the Holy Spirit, Jesus, and our brothers is really a veil over a nondualism so absolute that no such beings actually exist. There is nobody out there, and we just need to wake up to that.

I believe, however, that the Course comes down firmly on the loving personhood side. Its language, imagery, priorities—and in my view, its teaching—all sound as if they could have come straight out of someone’s NDE. So, while I can’t say that I know for a fact what ultimate reality is, I believe that I am here to learn how to unconditionally love others, so that I can reawaken to a God Who unconditionally loves me. I believe that I’m here to learn true relationship so that I can spend eternity in the One Relationship.

Take this this very instant, now, and think of it as all there is of time.

Nothing can reach you here out of the past,

And it is here that you are completely absolved, completely free, and wholly without condemnation. (T-15.I.9:5-6)

The more I do this practice, the more I get a sense of two very different views of time. In the first view, each moment is almost like a living thing, one that has an extremely brief life. It arises, last a second, and then passes away. The “body” of this living thing is composed of all the unique conditions contained in that moment. And as the moment itself passes away, so do those conditions within it. They change, and in changing, they “die,” never to be repeated again.

In the second view, there is only one present moment. It never changes. It never passes away. Rather, through it passes an endless succession of events. The events arise and pass away, true, but the moment in which they occur is ever the same.

The present moment, then, is like the light of a movie projector. The light itself never changes. It is constant. What changes are the frames that pass in front of it. Because the pictures in those frames are what we see, we have the impression that the light itself is always changing, but of course it is not. Only the film in front of the light is moving.

There are two places we can see ourselves as being. One is in the normal place, in the theater, where we don’t really see the light of the projector, only the projected images from the film. The other place is in that small gap in between the projector light and the film. There, we are more in touch with the constant light than with the changing film. There, we can abide in that unchanging light even while the endless parade of frames passes by.

So now I am repeating those lines above with this image in mind:

I take this  instant, now, and think of it as all there is of time. (I imagine myself facing the light of the projector, with the film behind me.)

Nothing can reach me here out of the past. (I imagine all the dark frames of the film being far away, where they cannot touch me, here in the light.)

And it is here that I am completely absolved, completely free, and wholly without condemnation. (The frames in which I “sinned” are both far away and are not part of the changeless light that I am facing, and only that light is real. So—thank God—I can feel truly absolved.)

I feel that doing this practice is at least moving me closer to that second place, to that second view of time. It’s a feeling of this moment expanding, rather than the weight of all my past regrets swamping it, burying it under a pile of imperfect memories. It’s feeling very freeing, and I hope that feeling continues and grows.

First, the differences we typically see between us are manifold and deep. Here are just a few:

• Differences in appearance: beautiful, ugly, thin, fat, young, old, healthy, sick
• Differences in ability
• Differences in gender
• Differences in wealth
• Differences in social status
• Differences in goodness of character: nice vs. mean, honest vs. lying, gentle vs. aggressive, giving vs. taking, etc.
• Differences in beliefs and values
• Different interests—one gaining while another loses, or even gaining from another losing
• Differences in being: my being is different than yours

When we meet someone, we instantly start assessing many of these differences, along with others I haven’t listed. And the more different we decide that someone is, the more that person becomes the alien, the stranger, even the enemy; someone we can’t relate to, someone not to be trusted, someone whose misfortune we secretly wish for.

I have been realizing that this sense of difference has run throughout my life. I have always felt different. Even though I like many of the same things that masses of other people like, in important ways I am moved by different things, things I find hard to explain to others and often misunderstood by others. This constantly undercuts the sense of solidarity and camaraderie that I should feel with everyone, making me feel, to a significant degree, alone and isolated, a fish out of water.

The second thing that’s been on my mind today has been a picture I associate with this lesson. The picture is this: Each person is really a Son of God, and as such is a literally infinite mind. There is a lot of room in an infinite mind, and a small part of this infinite mind is asleep and dreaming.

It is dreaming, of course, that it is a particular human being in the year 2012. This dream is a vastly curtailed state for it. Reducing its infinite mind down to the wattage of a human brain is like reducing the sun down to a firefly. Or, to change the metaphor, like being extremely heavily drugged. It’s like going to sleep.

But this infinite mind is not just dreaming it is this particular human being in 2012. It is also simultaneously dreaming that it’s countless other beings in countless other time periods, stretching back all the way along its individual past and forward all the way to its individual awakening to eternity. Its personal timeline is really happening all at once, in other words, since time itself is happening all at once. So this infinite mind is simultaneously dreaming being all the characters it ever was or ever will appear to be, experiencing all the moments of all their lives all at once.

Throughout the countless billions of scenes that this infinite mind’s attention is simultaneously scattered, three things are happening.

First, it is meeting its past choices, both mistakes and positive choices, in the form of lessons. It meets them in everything it sees and experiences—in the form it’s in, in the events that happen to it, in the feelings it experiences. All these things contain lessons for it, and all the lessons are really just the one lesson in different forms.

Second, God’s Voice is calling it home, by telling it how to interpret and respond to what it’s meeting, how to learn its lessons.

Third, it is learning, learning the many lessons, which add up to learning the one lesson—that it wants to be home with God again.

This is what I’m telling myself today. When I see someone, I try to remind myself that behind that body is an infinite mind which, through meeting the same lesson in countless billions of scenes, spanning the history of the universe, it is learning that it wants to be home with God. The lessons are really happening all at once, and the learning is too.

This is true no matter what form this mind appears in. If that mind appears inthe form of a criminal, this is true. If it is apparently sunk into a life of pure material concerns, this is true. If it appears in the form of a fundamentalist Christian, this is true. No matter how different than me this mind appears to be, this is still true.

That is what I am reminding myself of today, so that I can perceive no differences today.

The post was about a passage at the end of “Shadows of the Past” (T-17.III.10), in which Jesus says, “My holy brother, I would enter into all your relationships, and step between you and your fantasies.” The gist of the passage is that if we let him into the relationship, and let him step between us and the fantasies we’ve projected onto the other person, two things will happen. First, his presence will burst the bubble of our fantasies. Second, his reality will allow us to relate to the real person on the other end of this relationship.

It seemed to me that there was some principle behind all this, some idea that is not mentioned yet that explains why Jesus being in the relationship would both dispel the fantasies and bring in reality. Here is what I finally settled on:

The principle here, I think, is very simple. If Jesus is in the middle of the relationship, he, you could say, sets the tone for it. What is incompatible with him is dispelled; what is compatible with him is invited in. His reality, then, chases away our fantasies of the other person. And that same reality invites us into relationship with the reality of the other person.

With that principle (“if Jesus is in the middle of the relationship, he sets the tone for it”) in hand, another passage came to mind, one that contains a very similar principle:

The ego is the self-appointed mediator of all relationships, making whatever adjustments it deems necessary and interposing them between those who would meet, to keep them separate and prevent their union. (T-20.III.2:4)

Here, it’s the ego, rather than Jesus, that is in the middle of the relationship. It’s the “mediator.” To “mediate” means to “occupy a middle position.” And being in the middle, the ego sets the tone. Only here that tone is the opposite of what it was with Jesus. Where Jesus was there to join the two people in a real relationship, the ego is there “to keep them separate and prevent their union.” (If you want to read more about this passage, see my article, “The Depth and Intricacy of a Single Paragraph,” which is an extended exposition of the paragraph in which this sentence is found.)

So we can invite Jesus into the relationship, in which case he steps between us and our fantasies of the other person, separating us from those fantasies and allowing us to join with the actual person. Or we can allow the ego into the relationship, in which case it steps between us and the other person, separating us from that person.

What this showed me is that this principle I arrived at—”If Jesus is in the middle of the relationship, he sets the tone for it”—is a real principle. Only the principle is actually broader: “Whatever authority is in the middle of the relationship determines its direction.”

Through this, I feel I’ve learned a little bit about the mind of Jesus. When he thinks about relationships, part of what he’s thinking is “Which authority are you inviting into the middle of that relationship? Who is your chosen mediator? The one that will join the two, or the one that will separate them?”

He never states this principle, but clearly it’s in his mind. And that is what excites me. By looking closely at a particular passage and asking questions about it, we suddenly see its close relationship with another passage, and by looking at both together, we are given a window onto Jesus’ mind. We suddenly catch a larger glimpse of how he thinks about relationships. We see something he never directly says, but which is a source of things he does say.

And as always, what he thinks is both logically sound and practically effective. It makes sense that the mediator we choose will determine how the relationship goes. If you’ve been in an actual mediation, you know this to be true. And it places a very practical choice in our hands. Will we ask Jesus to enter into our relationships, and step between us and our fantasies? Or will we listen to the whispered advice of our ego, as it tells us how to “fix” the relationship in ways that will only separate the two of us?

This practice, given in the equivalent of Chapter 1, is a response from Jesus as to how ”sexual impulses can be directly translated into miracle impulses.” A variation on it is given in Chapter 2 (see 2.VI.7). And then in the equivalent of Chapter 3, it is called “the correction formula for fear.” So it is clearly an important practice. Here it is, with the different steps numbered:

In a situation where you or another person, or both, experience inappropriate sex impulses:

1. Know first that this is an expression of fear. Your love toward each other is not perfect and this is why the fear arose.
2. Turn immediately to me by denying the power of the fear, and ask me to help you replace it with love. This shifts the sexual impulse immediately to the miracle impulse and places it at my disposal.
3. Then acknowledge the true creative worth of both yourself and the other one. This places strength where it belongs.

Jesus stressed this so much—he revisits it two chapters later and calls it “the correction formula for fear”—it seemed like I should use it and let it be the transformative tool he intended it to be.

So what I did was take his three steps and turn it into a series of statements I could say to Jesus:

Jesus, I know this is fear.

I deny the power of the  fear,

and I turn instead to you.

Help me replace this fear with love.

I acknowledge the true creative worth of both myself and [name].

I give power to love and only to love.

This need not be limited to addressing inappropriate sexual impulses. As the later references to it make clear, it can be used for any form of fear. This includes anger, which seems strong in contrast to fear’s weakness, but ends up being just another way of feeling fear.

I’ve been using it for the last couple of days and getting a lot out of it. It moves from acknowledging the fear and denying its power, to asking for Jesus to be there and to help, to finally inviting love, affirming love, and giving power to love. On that last part, I first ask Jesus to bring in love (“Help me replace this fear with love”), then I actively invite love myself (“I acknowledge the true creative worth of both myself and [name]“), and finally I affirm what I’ve just done (“I give power to love and only to love”).

I also find it extremely interesting just how similar this is to the practice in Chapter 17:

• Both are solutions to projecting your sexual fantasies onto someone (the “correction formula for fear” comes in a section about sexual fantasies).
• Both involve inviting Jesus in.
• In both, Jesus helps you dispel the illusion you have put on the other person.
• And in both, he helps you into a true perception of that person.

Clearly, this seems to be his idea of how we deal with the typical attraction that sees another as just an object for the fulfillment of our pleasure drive. In fact, there is yet another variation on this basic pattern, this time with the Holy Spirit rather than Jesus:

The Holy Spirit asks only this little help of you: Whenever your thoughts wander to a special relationship which still attracts you, enter with Him into a holy instant, and there let Him release you. (T-16.VI.12:1)

I’m sure you can see the commonalities. We could call this core practice “the Course cold shower.”

Anyway, I really encourage you to use “the correction formula for fear.” Jesus wouldn’t have included something like that and returned to it again and again if he didn’t want us to use it and if it didn’t have power to help us.

I’ve been in basically the same place. But the other day I thought of a simple visual picture to connect with the meaning of Atonement and make it more practical. Let me walk you through it.

First, picture yourself on the left side and God on the right, with a good-sized space in the middle. Keep it simple—you might picture you as a little circle and God as a big one. So you’re on the left and God’s on the right.

Second, picture a tall block in between you and God, keeping you apart. The top half of this block is labeled “My Errors” and the bottom half is labeled “My Sense of Sinfulness.” These two things obviously go together, since your errors cause your sense of sinfulness. Both of these become a single block that stands between you and God, making it appear that you are alone and that He is remote and inaccessible.

To make this more practical, you might think of some of your errors—loveless things you have done, loveless perceptions you have held of other people. And then think of your sense of sinfulness, your sense that you and God don’t really fit because He is holy and you are not.

Third, picture a big eraser coming down and wiping away the block, wiping away both your errors and your sense of sinfulness. That is what Atonement does. It wipes your sins away, opening the way for reconciliation with God. In Christianity, it does this by Jesus paying for your sins. In the Course, it does this because your sins were never real in the first place. The Course says the Atonement:

• “enables you to realize that your errors never really occurred” (T-2.I.4:4)
• “undoes all errors” (T-1.III.5:7)
• “undoes your past errors” (T-2.II.6:5)
• “means the undoing of errors” (M-18.4:6)
• “teaches him that, never having sinned, he has no need of salvation” (T-13.In.4:6)
• “is the means by which the world is saved from sin, for sin does not exist” (C-4.3:8)

So picture that big eraser coming down and wiping away your errors and sense of sinfulness, leaving a clean and empty space between you and God. While it comes down, you may even say to yourself, “My errors never really occurred.”

Now, with nothing keeping you apart, you and God can unite. More technically, you can recognize the oneness with God that was there all along but was obscured by that illusory block, which the Atonement has now wiped away. See the little circle on the left unite with the big circle on the right.

Whenever you hear “Atonement” or “accept the Atonement,” just bring to mind that image of you and God separated by that block. Then see the big eraser of Atonement come down and wipe that block away, leaving you free to unite with God. Hopefully, all those question marks that appear in your head whenever you encounter the word, can now turn into lightbulbs.

(Greg Mackie adds an excellent point: “To get in touch with the term ‘Atonement’ even more, I think it might also be helpful to think of times when you reconciled with another person. I can think of such times myself, and in those reconciliations, there was a real sense of ‘All that stuff that stood between us is wiped away.’ The wall of our past loveless acts and resentments just wasn’t there any more. That, of course, is exactly what we’re supposed to experience with God via the Atonement.)

My holy brother, I would enter into all your relationships, and step between you and your fantasies. Let my relationship to you be real to you, and let me bring reality to your perception of your brothers. They were not created to enable you to hurt yourself through them. They were created to create with you. This is the truth that I would interpose between you and your goal of madness. Be not separate from me, and let not the holy purpose of Atonement be lost to you in dreams of vengeance. Relationships in which such dreams are cherished have excluded me. Let me enter in the Name of God and bring you peace, that you may offer peace to me. (T-17.III.10)

The starting point for this passage is two very different ideas. One idea is that we have difficulty convincing ourselves that our relationship with Jesus is actually real. Our senses can’t see him or hear him or touch him. How can we be sure he’s there? What if he’s just the adult equivalent of an imaginary playmate?

The other idea is that our human relationships are typically not real relationships. We aren’t in a real relationship with the real other person. Rather, we have projected our fantasies onto that person and are in a private relationship with our private fantasies. That’s not exactly a relationship, is it?

What I find so brilliant about this passage is that, in its teaching, overturning the first is the key to overturing the second. In other words, letting the relationship with Jesus be real to us is the way to have all our relationships be real.

Specifically, we acknowledge that Jesus is really there, and invite him to enter into the rest of our relationships. We see him stepping between us and our fantasies of others. This simple image is very powerful and surprisingly effective. Imagine that you are projecting onto someone your fantasies of how that person can meet your every (ego-) need. While lost in this fantasy, you aren’t thinking just how unreal, unloving, and ego-centered this is. Then imagine Jesus, not as an imaginary image but as real, stepping in between you and this fantasy. What happens in your mind?

The person is in front of you—Jesus—now represents reality, love, and God-centeredness. What can that do but burst the bubble of your unreal, unloving, and ego-centered fantasy?

And then, this real relationship with Jesus can facilitate a real relationship with the other person. The principle here, I think, is very simple. If Jesus is in the middle of the relationship, he, you could say, sets the tone for it. What is incompatible with him is dispelled; what is compatible with him is invited in. His reality, then, chases away our fantasies of the other person. And that same reality invites us into relationship with the reality of the other person.

The last couple of days I’ve made this paragraph the focus of my practice. I’m so captivated by it. The image of Jesus entering our relationships and stepping between us and our fantasies is a very practical one. And the idea of a real relationship with Jesus allowing us to have real relationships with others is simply brilliant. Who would have thought to combine those two ideas? That is the kind of wisdom that I just don’t find anywhere else. That’s the kind of wisdom that keeps me bound to the Course.

Considerations like this led me for a long time to deny that time travel was possible. It seems to make no sense. But then I realized that if all of time is happening simultaneously, then the past, too, is happening now. And if separation is not real, then we are not really separate from the past. So why couldn’t we affect it? I still don’t understand the whole pocket watch thing, but I’m sure there are a lot of things I don’t understand.

So here are the quotes I had collected over time:

1. And it [the idea, “Forgiveness is my function as the light of the world”] will help those around you, as well as those who seem to be far away in space and time, to share this happiness with you. (W-pI.62.4:3)

2. Here [in the idea “I rest in God”] is the end of suffering for all the world, and everyone who ever came and yet will come to linger for a while. (W-pI.109.2:5)

3. Time is not the guardian of what we give today [through practicing “I rest in God”]. We give to those unborn and those passed by, to every Thought of God, and to the Mind in which these Thoughts were born and where they rest. (W-pI.109.9:4-5)

4. What we receive [through doing today's lesson] is our eternal gift to those who follow after, and to those who went before or stayed with us a while. (W-pI.124.3:1)

5. No miracle can ever be denied to those who know that they are one with God [idea for the day]. No thought of theirs but has the power to heal all forms of suffering in anyone, in times gone by and times as yet to come, as easily as in the ones who walk beside them now. Their thoughts are timeless, and apart from distance as apart from time. (W-pI.124.6)

These quotes make it as clear as can be that the Course is claiming we can heal suffering in people who are in the past—”in times gone by…as easily as in the ones who walk beside them now.”

But here is what I found really interesting about these passages: They bring it all down to a very practical punch line. This idea is one of those that can easily inspire lots of metaphysical speculation (“Where in the hell did that watch come from?”). Yet, in characteristic form, the Course takes this high-flying idea and brings it down to something very practical: Do your Workbook practice today. That is the point in all five passages. They all mention healing people in the past as an incentive to practicing that day’s lesson.

So the notion of backward causation is merely playing a supporting role to the truly important idea: the power of doing your practice. Your practice, we are told, is so powerful, that it can heal people right now in faraway places. Indeed, it can heal people in ”times as yet to come.” Hardest to believe of all, it can heal people “in times gone by.” Why can it do that? Because the healing thoughts you gain from doing your practice reach out to everything real, in all times and all places.

I think there is something truly beautiful in the Course taking such a mind-bending idea and, rather than encouraging us to get lost in speculation about it, using it purely as an incentive to sit down right now and do today’s Workbook lesson.

1. As a creation of God, our will must be free. God’s Will is free and we are like Him, so ours must be, too. In the original dictation, Jesus mentioned “the proper creation by man in his right mind” and then said that this “required the endowment of man by God with free will, because all loving creation is freely given.” In other words, to create, we need to have a free will.
2. This necessarily means we inherently possess the ability to choose wrong.
3. Our freedom must be used, however, to point our will in the right direction. This is how we create in Heaven and how we remain aware of Heaven.
4. We most effectively learn which direction is the right direction by the results of our choices. Although choosing entails an inherent awareness of the rightness or wrongness of a choice, that rightness or wrongness comes through much more strongly when we experience the (joyful or painful) results of that choice.
5. Experiencing the painful results of wrong choices and the joyful results of right choices ultimately educates us to point our will in the right direction—consistently and eternally.

OK, that’s the single idea. We have to have free will, because God does. This means we have to have the ability to make wrong choices. That seems bad, but it’s OK, because the experiential results of making wrong (and right) choices will inevitably educate us. It will inevitably teach us to point our will consistently (and eternally) in the right direction.

This single idea does a lot of work at once.

First, it explains the separation. Once God created us free, the possibility of us choosing separation—pointing our will away from God—was automatically there. But when we did, the results of that would simply educate us to point our will back in God’s direction.

Second, it explains why things happen in our lives the way they do. Events in our lives are merely the results of past choices coming home to roost in the most educational manner possible. Once we chose separation, we needed a feedback mechanism by which the results of our choices would be delivered to us, thus educating our will about which direction to point in. That feedback mechanism is the events of our lives (along with our emotional reactions).

Third, it is part of the explanation for why wrong choices are ultimately innocent. Wrong choices are not an expression of a fundamental wrongness in us. They are not the proof that we are sinful. They are just a way in which we learn. Sometimes you need to put your hand on the stove before you learn to not touch the stove. And we all will eventually learn that.

What is going on in this world, then, is that inherently perfect Sons of God are appearing in forms that reflect their past choices and are surrounded by circumstances that reflect their past choices, so that, quite simply, they can learn from those choices. They can learn which way to point their all-powerful wills. That is all that is happening in this world. It doesn’t matter if some of those Sons look more holy and some look more sinful, or if some appear more spiritual and some seem more worldly. They are all the same and are all simply going through a process of the education of their wills.

If we back all the way up to the biggest picture possible, here is what happened: In Heaven we chose a wrong thought, “Maybe I’ll be better off if I am a special Son, or if I can be more than a created being.” Then, in an instant, this thought fragmented into trillions of time-space episodes that reflected this thought—or more accurately, reflected various ratios of either going into this thought or moving out of it. All those episodes were experiential results of that thought. On a trillion fronts at once, then, we experienced the education of our will. We experienced the pain that comes from separation choices and the joy that comes from union choices. And then it was over. It only took an instant. We put our hand on the stove, and then we took it off and said, “I’m not doing that again.” We learned to point our wills consistently in God’s direction, to shine them consistently in the direction of creating.

Now, however, we seem to still be in that ancient separation thought, and experience our awareness locked up in one tiny episode—in this place and time, and nowhere else. But in reality, all that is going on is that this is one education-point in a vast process, whereby we are learning, via the results of our choices, to point our wills in the right direction. And that is what is also happening to the person in front of us, and the one to our right, and the one to our left. That’s what’s happening to everyone we see. We are seeing a Son of God appearing in a form that reflects past choices and surrounded by circumstances that reflect past choices, so that he can ultimately learn which way to point his will.

This may not do much for you, as it is very theoretical. But for me what it does is wrap a lot up in a nice simple package: why the separation occurred, why things happen to us the way they do, why people are innocent even when they choose wrong.