A Course In Miracles Deep Dive Chapter 2, Section XII Paragraph 8 to 10. Math, Miracles, And The Myth Of Lack | October 22, 2025

The End of Minus — Mastering Love in A Course in Miracles

What if “lack” is just bad math… and love has no minus sign?
In this episode, we dive deep into The Mastery of Love as presented in A Course in Miracles and expose the unconscious arithmetic that keeps us counting losses, tracking decline, and budgeting our worth.

Using the striking example of negative numbers, we reveal how the ego’s logic is expertly designed to organize illusions—without ever touching what’s real.

✨ Key Highlights:

• Love has no opposite. Minus values don’t exist in truth—so why do we keep living as if they do?
• Wholeness cannot be fractioned. Withholding love from even one person fractures our awareness of unity.
• Time scarcity, aging, debt, fixed income, “falling behind”—we unpack all these common scripts as mental accounting errors, not spiritual reality.
• Atonement as practical correction: Not a payment or negotiation, but the recognition that separation never occurred.
• Readiness vs accomplishment: Readiness opens the door. Accomplishment is walking through it.
• Confidence follows mastery—not the other way around. We learn to choose truth consistently without waiting to feel certain first.

You’ll hear simple, actionable steps to:

• Notice a feeling without naming it a problem,
• Drop the story that tries to explain it,
• Invite reinterpretation from the Holy Spirit,
• Choose again—this time for love.

We illuminate why fear can’t be mastered (it’s not real) and love can be mastered—by choosing not to abandon it in the smallest moments of everyday life.

✨ If you’re ready to live without a minus sign… this episode is for you.

Press play, subscribe, and share it with a friend who’s done measuring life in terms of loss and is ready to remember wholeness.

💛 And if this moved you, leave a review:
What belief are you ready to drop next?

Chapters

• 0:00 Opening, Prayer, And Setup
• 3:30 Section Clarified: The Mastery Of Love
• 4:20 Minus Numbers As Ego Logic
• 11:45 Lack, Aging, And Practical Examples
• 15:50 The Limits Of Mathematics And Reality
• 24:40 No Degrees Of Negation
• 30:15 Wholeness, Sonship, And Inclusion
• 36:00 Divine Psyche And The Son’s Unique Faculty
• 43:00 Choosing Nothingness Versus Atonement
• 55:10 Atonement Frees The Past
• 1:03:10 Additional Awarenesses For Acceptance
• 1:06:50 Readiness Versus Accomplishment
• 1:15:20 Divided Will And Gentle Training
• 1:25:30 Confidence Emerges After Mastery
• 1:30:10 Fear Cannot Be Mastered, Love Can
• 1:39:30 Readiness For Revelation, Not Mastery
• 1:53:20 Closing, Schedule, And Resources

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:05

Aloha and welcome to a Course in Miracles deep dive with Hope Johnson. Today it looks like we may be finishing off section eleven from a course in miracles. Section eleven. Let's see what's happening here. Paragraph eight, sent sentence one is where we're gonna start. And this is in a course in miracles, the newer version. This is from 2021. That's when it was published. It's called the Complete Annotated Edition, and it's a little bit purple. I love you. Thank you. I see you. It's a little bit purple, and uh it's a purplish color. And if you're looking at it, it's called the Complete and Annotated Edition, published in 2021. You do not need to have the book to do this with me. I go over things very slowly and explain them very well if I do say so myself. At least I feel like they're well explained to myself. Let's put it that way. All right. And some of my friends dig it too, so that's always fun. It's always fun to share. All right, so I love to start this off with a prayer. I must say, praying feels a little bit strange to me right now, just because I get the sense that I'm only praying to myself, which is the truth. That is the truth. So yeah, I'll just see what happens. I'll just sink in and see what happens. Let's connect, connect to the breath, connect to the sense in the body. Yes, yay. Ah, what makes perfect sense here is gratitude. Gratitude, gratitude, gratitude to all of our brothers, gratitude to God, gratitude to Jesus, gratitude to self. It's all the same. Gratitude is natural in recognizing the sameness. May we recognize the sameness in everything and everyone so that we may appreciate and enjoy and use the apparent differences for healing our mind. Yay, and thank you, Jesus, for these words and thank you for staying with us with complete patience, patience that never ends. Yay, thank you for this beautiful space. ACIM deep dives with Hope Johnson. Let's go. Woo! I love you guys. Thank you for joining. Yay! Yay, yay, yay. Okay, let's get started. So let me see what section we are in. I'm gonna go into the book here. The mastery of love. We're actually in section 12. I misread that one. Uh, we're actually in section 12 of the complete annotated edition. It's the mastery of love. That's the name of the section. And we're on the end of that section. The past two ACIM deep dives covered earlier paragraphs. Yay! All right, let's get into it. People on Zoom, you can raise your hand if you have any questions or anything. People on Substack, uh, I check on you. So just write in the comments if you want to talk to me. All right. Paragraph eight, sentence one. The concept of minus numbers has always been regarded as a mathematical rather than an actual expedient. So this is fun. Jesus is getting into math now. I love this. So here he's using the example of minus numbers, negative numbers. This is how he's uh drawing uh would that be like a metaphor? No, it's not even a metaphor because he's saying, you know, it's mathematic in mathematics, minus numbers uh are not an actual expedient. So this is how the ego invents concepts that have no real existence. They're accepted like you know, negative numbers is accepted in our mathematical system as useful constructs. Okay, they don't correspond to anything in actual reality. Okay, so nothing truly exists in a state of less than being. Nothing can be in a state of less than what is. You can't have a negative life, you can't have uh negative, there's not negative love, there's not negative reality. These are impossible. Okay, some ways the mind accepts the idea of lack, loss, debt, deficiency, deprivation, as if these things are actual conditions. These are really an extension of this ego's minus numbers, negative numbers, which are just intellectual constructs. They have utility in a system based in separation, but they don't have any uh any place in truth. So minus numbers, negative numbers work in mathematics. They're accepted as a utility, but not as a reality. Uh well, they're accepted as a reality, but they're not a reality. Minus numbers in mathematics work the same way guilt, fear, and unworthiness seem to work in the world. They help us organize illusions. This still doesn't make our illusions real, doesn't make any real sense. Negative numbers like negative reality doesn't make any real sense. So the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit's thought system teaches us to recognize that any concept that moves away from fullness and abundance and abundance, you know, that uh reflects lack in any way in completeness, it's not an actual condition, it's just a device, it's an ego device. So it's invented to make separation appear meaningful. So here's how this can apply practically. When you believe, like let's say I'm losing time or I'm short on time, or I'm in debt, or I don't have enough, and I'm not enough. How about I'm aging, I'm diminishing, I'm diminishing in strength, or love is being taken away from me. You know, it's like these thoughts are giving us the perfect opportunity. Look at this, it's fun. I find it really fun. It's giving us a perfect opportunity to see this. Whenever you, I'm gonna say again, whenever you believe in something like I'm short on time, or I'm losing time, or I'm in debt, or I'm not enough, aging, diminishing, love being taken away from me. That's like believing in negative numbers, using using some imaginary construct to justify this interpretation. So, this is inviting us to withdraw belief from these constructs, and it's really fun, you guys, because you get the feeling effect of believing in a construct, but you don't re-believe in it, so you don't feed it anything, and that's how the truth expands in your mind. Creation extends, there's just no minus, there's no negative uh numbers in God, so you can't possibly be in any sort of lack or deficiency except in your own imagination. So look where you're accepting any minus, a belief that something's lessening. Okay, here's a really good practical example for this. Okay. Um, I have a friend who's uh seeming to be in his late 60s, and he uh doesn't have the strength to do a certain thing right now, apparently. So he treats it like he's he can't do that anymore, like he's never gonna be able to do that again, like he's somehow some kind of depletion. And it's not like that. This is maybe you're perceiving yourself like this right now, but your mind is actually projecting your body, even all biological things that are going on. So recognize that that's a device of the ego to say, like, now you're now you can't do that anymore. It's a it's it's like a mathematical device of the ego. Look at that, it's not your actual state of being, and your actual state of being uh just joins with everything exactly as it appears to be, not trying to make it permanent. You know, this aging things thing, it's like a uh a way the ego uses permanent, like this is permanently in place. This is what always occurs, right? This is ridiculous. This decline. There's no real decline except for, you know, in our minds, what's going on in our minds is we continue to accumulate misbelief. And when we accumulate misbelief, we project aging and death onto our own bodies, and we project conflict with others, those two things we project. Those things, so uh, so it's like when you perceive anything like that, it's in recognizing that it is a projection, it's not a reality, there's no minus, there's no depletion, there's no real depletion. Your mind is all powerful to project any kind of body, let's say. Except it does affect you are your perceived reality, because your mind is all powerful to make illusions. Yay, I love you. Thank you for joining everyone. Okay, paragraph eight, sentence two. Yet it represents a major limitation on mathematics as presently understood. This is fun. Hmm, this negative number thing represents a major limitation on mathematics as presently understood. Interesting. So here's footnote 162 about this. As documented by Alberto Martinez in Negative Math: How Mathematical Rules Can Be Positively Bent. Apparently, this is a book from 2005. Negative numbers, now taken for granted, actually created a deep philosophical divide in mathematics. Did you guys ever hear about this when you were in elementary school? Learning negative numbers? Interesting. Especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this is when it was going down. This rift was never truly resolved. Opponents gradually died off, and negative numbers slowly became accepted for their practical value in calculations. Isn't that fun? I love this. So Jesus is stating here that the very inclusion of negative numbers introduced a fundamental limitation in the way mathematics itself, not only mathematics itself, but also worldly logic understands reality. Isn't that fun? I was like, oh, how fun we're all conditioned in negative number kind of mathematics. That makes perfect sense. So here's why. Here's why it introduces this limitation. Because negative numbers represent less than nothing. That's a state that has no actual existence. Less than nothing has no actual existence. This negative number inclusion in mathematics was fiercely debated. Because it doesn't correspond to anything real in experience. It makes no sense. So uh we've been persistently using this lack mentality until it's just taken as a reality, and like we could have debt and stuff like that now. It's funny. Uh so mathematics represents the world's framework of reason. That's what's going on here. Negative numbers represent the ego's introduction of lack, loss, guilt, deficiency. It grounds its logic like this in the possibility of subs of subtraction from being. So this makes our mathematic system a closed system that can never reflect truth because truth only extends. There's no minus in truth, right? So any system allowing for minus is already denying the eternal nature of creation, it's not true, it's building unreality. It's there's this foundation, and it's building unreality on the foundation and passing it off at this point as a principle, like it's true. And Jesus says, This is a major limitation. Here's the whole sentence. Yet this negative number, it being the negative numbers, represents a major limitation on mathematics as presently understood. Sentence two. See, this is an idea like as if there's a negative to being. You're thinking negative numbers, basically. It's a fictional construct. You may be experiencing tiredness in the moment, but the thought that says my energy is decreasing, it's a negative number. Your energy can't decrease, you're all energy. You have fleeting experience, experiences, and then you make those into something when you make them into uh a negative number, let's say this is a direct call. This sentence is a direct call to stop using ego math when evaluating yourself or your life. The only evaluation is I am as God created me. There's nothing to add or subtract from that, okay? Just I am as God created me and stay like that. All right, we're moving on. Paragraph eight, sentence three. So in the last sentence, in the last couple sentences, he was saying that minus numbers, negative numbers, are a conceptual error. So now he's taking it further. He's saying something cannot be more or less negative, that's completely meaningless. Negation itself does not exist. No one can ever lose what is real, not part of it, not even part of it. You cannot subtract from what God created. So to speak of like uh less worthy, less whatever, less, you know, less holy is just to speak nonsense. There's only wholeness. Some things don't have less reality than others. There's only wholeness, and everything that you perceive in the world is based on error, not wholeness. Isn't that so fun? That's because it's not there and it's made from the thought of separation being projected over time. Isn't that so fun? All right. Anyways, what is negation in ACIM terms, in a course in miracles terms? That's the idea that truth, what God created, can ever be denied, diminished, or opposed. Okay, so let's read that. A sentence again. Any statement which implies degrees of difference in negation, in negation is essentially meaningless. Any statement, so that's any statement, a concept like sin or guilt or unworthiness or lack or decay or death or aging. These are all forms of negation. Okay, I'll give you an aging one. Uh going, I can't, it's pretty much the same thing as I just gave the, I gave the example. Like, I can't do that anymore. That's the one I hear a lot. And I'll just bring that to the truth. I don't normally get that sense in my own mind. I can't do that anymore. But you know, I've gotten the sense before, like, I can't wear that anymore. Like my body's not in good enough shape to wear that anymore. And that's a lot, that's a negative number right there. That may be the experience right now that that piece of clothing is not attractive on you right now, but it doesn't indicate decline. It tries to. You don't have to let it do that. Don't let your mind go into forms of negation. Okay. Another example is uh where people think they're on fixed income. Like uh, like now they can't afford to do whatever they get the mind to do, let's say, because they're on fixed income. You know, you're only just experiencing, and the illusion can change at any time because it's reflecting your mindset, it's all it's doing. So don't negate what's true, your all-powerful mind projecting uh this body in this world in a dream. Okay. Uh so once you accept that something real can be negated at all, you're totally in illusion mode. You're totally like asleep in the dream. It's like these degrees of negation are really like the degrees of impossibility. So this is uprooting the ego's hierarchy of illusions. Look, any statement which implies degrees of difference in negation is essentially meaningless. Okay, so uh I made a little kind of like a little chart in my notes. Uh ego thought this sin is worse, worse than that one. This is meaningless because all negation is unreal. So, like one sin is worse than another sin. Basically, there's no sin. Okay, here's another one aging slowly versus aging quickly. Meaningless conversation, aging itself is negation itself. So that's like, oh, you look good for your age. It's as if we're all supposed to be on the decline. Or if you get the sense, uh, the ego thought, I've lost a little peace, a little bit of peace. Peace cannot be divided. You're either wholly in peace or you're in conflict. That's how that works. Uh, or someone is more guilty than you. It's a meaningless thought because guilt is unreal altogether. So there's no degrees of illusion, it just has no truth at all. So this it this applies to evaluation, like say how bad something is, or how much you've lost, maybe how much you lost in some deal or something. Pause on that. Are you trying to you there's no loss? Is it better to lose a little or lose a lot? I mean, there's no loss, that's the thing. So notice when you're trying to assign degrees to something that have no existence. Evaluating forms of nothing. And you know what? If that's the case, don't judge, just stop. You don't need to choose the lesser illusion, you just choose truth. The truth says that that isn't real. God didn't make it, therefore, it does not exist. I see you, Karen. I'll get to your question in a moment. Yay! Oh, actually, I'll get to it now because I finished on that one. All right. Uh yes. First hope, I love you with the highest of all love that exists. I remember in school asking how any math could be negative. I remember asking, how can there be a negative something? I have been asleep in the dream. Oh, you're such a joy. Oh, thank you. Thank you for noticing. That's so awesome. That is so awesome. And you recognize you've been asleep in the dream. That is awakening in process right there. It's beautiful. Thank you for doing that, and thank you for joining. Yeah, I love you. Thank you to everyone who's joining right now and everyone who's joining later in the recording. Yay. All right, we're going on to paragraph eight, sentence four. Did we really do three sentences? We did, didn't we? Okay. Sentence four. And this one's got a footnote. Okay, so there's a little bit of reading here. What can replace this negative approach is a recognition of the fact that as long as one part, which is the same as a million or ten or eight thousand parts of the sonship is missing, it is not complete. And here's footnote one sixty three. This sentence describes Jesus' replacement for the current approach, or these sentences describe Jesus' replacement for the current approach. Negative numbers. His point is that negation doesn't really have degrees. You cannot really have different degrees of nothingness. Therefore, one son missing from the sonship, minus one, is the same as a million sons missing, minus one million. In both cases, the sonship is incomplete. So Jesus is what Jesus is doing here is offering a spiritual correction to the mathematical idea of negative values. So instead of thinking in terms of degrees of loss, this is how we do with negative numbers, he's introducing the reality principle. There's no such thing as less completeness. Something is either whole or it's not. So the sonship, this is in case you're new to it, the sonship is all of God's creation. That's all of us in one unified reality. So this sonship, all of us, one creation, can't be partially whole. If one part of us appears to be missing, it's the same as if a million parts were missing. We just can't experience wholeness. It's not about quantity that in this, it's the nature of reality. It's absolute and indivisible. So negation is not measured in degrees. It's either whole or it's not. And then wholeness can't really be fractioned. So perceived separation. This is what this is telling us. Perceived separation from even one brother is where you hold something, a grievance against them, it's a complete denial of truth and separation from all in your imagination. That's how that works. See? So this is why Jesus has said your awakening isn't personal. This is a shared awakening. You can't awaken alone because you were not created alone. Your wholeness includes every brother. This is a very important concept in a Course in Miracles to realize. You know, an awakening period. This has to be seen. And it will be. That perception, though, blocks the completion awareness. Your awareness of your own completion. Withholding love in your heart from even one brother, could be anyone, could be the president. Withholding love from even one brother is the belief in minus. It's a mathematical impossibility, but it becomes your reality. And your reality proves that that's your perceived reality, proves that that's true over and over again because it's become your belief. Thank you, Caitlin. I find it super important to hear too. I'm so glad you're joining me on this. I love you. Okay, moving on to sentence five, paragraph eight. In the divine psyche, the father and the holy spirit are not incomplete at all. The divine psyche here, that's referring to the mind of God. This is undivided awareness. It encompasses the father and the Holy Spirit. The divine psyche. There's no conception of lack, separation, or division. No minus, no subtraction. The father here says the father and the holy spirit are not incomplete at all. That represents the source, that's pure being. The Holy Spirit, that's representing extension of pure being. The active presence of God's will. Those are all thoughts that align with the active presence of God's will. That's the Holy Spirit. Those thoughts extend. The Father is the source, the Holy Spirit is the extension. Together, they're wholly complete. They are not incomplete at all, it says they exist in perfect oneness. They contain all that is, and there's no awareness of anything outside of that. The divine, you'd say God and the Holy Spirit, the divine psyche does not complete perceive incompleteness. Incompleteness is inconceivable to it. There's not any awareness of a missing part in God. There's a fullness, an eternally extending fullness of extending itself. So this is establishing a foundation here. It's saying what God is and what the Holy Spirit is cannot be diminished. It's not affected by anything, it's never interrupted by any illusions of separation. These illusions of separation, they occur in the mind of the Son, which is still one with God and the Holy Spirit. They occur, but they're not reality. They occur in a dream in the mind of the sun. It's a dream of exile. It says that other places in A Course in Miracles. But God does not dream in exile. That's not God's dream. I love you guys. Thank you. Oh, thank you, Caitlin. I feel so loved. Caitlin says, I'm a gift to awakening for us. Ah, for us all, myself included. I'm grateful too. Thank you. I'm so grateful that you joined. It's such a blessing. Okay, let's get on to the next sentence. Paragraph eight, sentence six. The sonship has the unique faculty of believing in error or incompleteness if it so elects. The sonship has a unique faculty. That's a fun one. Unique faculty. Okay, let's get into this of believing in error or incompleteness if it so elects. So that's the only seeming distinction between the Son and the Father and the Holy Spirit. That's what he's saying. It's a unique faculty because the Father doesn't, the Father and the Holy Spirit don't have that unique faculty of believing in error. The father just creates, the Holy Spirit extends and corrects. The sonship, which is all of us as one Christ mind, has the unique faculty, the unique capacity to believe in what is not true. This is not a real power, it's a capacity, a unique faculty to misuse power. This is how we entertain illusions. That's why I say what fun, right? That's why I say what fun. It's entertainment. That's all it is. And you know, through perceiving the entertainment and embracing it, all we're really embracing is our own feelings. We embrace our feelings. We don't have to accept any external conditions. That's not what acceptance is for. That shit is changing so fast. Accept your feeling reaction to it. That's how it changes in your favor, let's say, because as you're accepting your feeling reaction to the illusions, you're actually undoing the belief that's causing the feeling reaction and the thoughts about it, which manifest as physical form. So hooray. What is this faculty that Jesus is talking about? It's a power of the mind to elect, which means choose what it'll be what it will believe. Can choose that even if the belief has no reality. But it does change what's experience in consciousness. That election to believe in zero reality, negative reality, let's say, is experience in your consciousness. So it looks like a real ass world, full of loss, full of lack, full of doubt. But it's not real. You can't really get a headache. Oh, I elected the experience of incompleteness. That's what this is reflecting. It's not because I didn't drink coffee. One of my friends was sharing that on Monday in Wisdom Dialogues. It's not caused by anything in the world, it's caused by my election to experience a state of incompleteness. I voted for this. This is revealing the cause of all suffering. So let's read it again. The sonship has the unique faculty of believing in error or incompleteness, if it so elects. So this is the cause of all suffering. It's saying it's not the world, it's not the bodies, it's not God, it's the son's choice to believe in lack. So obviously, salvation lies in reversing that choice. That's why a Course in Miracle says choose again a shitload of times, I think, unless it just really stands out to me when it says that. So what was elected here, which is chosen, can be de-elected. What's what was believed in can be unbelieved in. You're never a victim of this incompleteness that you're projecting onto yourself. You're just choosing to believe right now, in this moment, a concept that has no reality. You can have relief right now. This recognizing this is the beginning of being empowered. If you elected it, you can unelect it. Yay, let's unelect it. I love unelecting things. Thank you, Christina. I love you. Thank you so much. I'm so glad you're with me too. Thank you. This is such a blessing. All of you are such a blessing. I see you guys on Substack too. Thank you for your comments. Thank you for being here. All right. All right, paragraph eight, sentence seven. However, it is quite apparent that so to elect is to believe in the existence of nothingness. Hmm, that's fun. Thank you, Jesus. That's a uh very pointed way to put it. However, it is quite apparent that so to elect, elect nothingness, is to believe in the existence of nothingness. So now he's making it explicit what he was implying in the last sentence to elect, to believe in error or incompleteness, is to choose to believe in nothing, in non-existence, masquerading as existence. See, people uh believe that this what we perceive, this world that we perceive, this is existence. It's not, it's masking existence. It's meant, it's proving, it's meant to prove error from the ego's point of view. Believe in it. Recognize it's your projection. Nothingness refers to anything not created by God: lack, guilt, sin, death, separation, all nothing. These are not less real than the truth, they're actually not real at all. They don't exist in any degree, they do not exist. To believe in them just because you see them, hey, I see people dying all over the place. I hear it on the news, Gaza, whatever the story is. To believe in it, though, it's one thing to recognize oh, wow, I got a feeling reaction from perceiving that there's dying. But recognizing there is no dying, that's self-deception. Valuing illusions, investing belief in what has no substance and no source at all. Be responsible for your own feelings. Recognize that these feelings that are arising right now are exactly what I need to see through this illusion rather than make it more real. Such a joy to practice like that. You just dive into deeper, deeper joy. So to believe in incompleteness is to believe in unreality. That's the same thing, right? Let's go back to the sentence. However, it is quite apparent that so to elect, that's the believe in incompleteness, is to believe in the existence of nothingness. It places faith in zero and calls it something. So this is how the ego looks at it. It takes nothing, it wraps it up in meaning and it treats it as if it's everything. I have this death for, for instance, it substitutes illusions for the truth. So wherever there's fear of loss, feeling abandoned, lack perceived lack in ourselves or others, people don't have enough, whatever, energy, time, whatever it seems to be. We're literally believing in nothing. You know, when someone tells me I have no time or something like that, I'll just go, you know what? Uh there's no such thing as time. You're actually making that up right now, whether I say that out my mouth or not, because if the conversation is always with myself, I don't see them as being separate from myself. I see that as being a reflection of my own mind asking for correction right now. That doesn't mean I need to correct a person. I'm just allowing the Holy Spirit's interpretation to correct a thought. See, so that's why I don't really need to say anything. I just listen and talk if it feels joyful. That's how I know the Holy Spirit is guiding it. It feels joyful, it feels inspired. So fearing loss, feeling abandoned, perceiving lack, this is not a reason to be guilty. It's actually cause for laughter and getting released when you recognize that it's not a reality. Oh my gosh, there's this fear of loss. Like, what if I lose the house? Let's say that just popped into my mind, apparently. What if I lose the house? Uh well, there's no such thing as loss. So if you seem to lose the house, that will be an opportunity to embrace whatever feelings arise at the idea that there's loss. And really, right now is presenting an opportunity to embrace those feelings because you're imagining it right now, and there's only now. So you're not really suffering from anything real when you're in fear, you're just reacting to nothing. That's the thing to be seen. Yay. Okay, paragraph eight, set sentence eight. The correction of this error is the atonement. Very short and pointed sentence. The correction of this error is the atonement. Okay, let's break this down. The error is the sonship's belief in incompleteness, which is also nothingness. Atonement is the correction of that belief. The correction of this error, belief in incompleteness, that's what we've been on, is the atonement. So atonement isn't changing reality. The reality is reality, it's not your believed reality, and it's never been incomplete. So atonement is correcting the belief that incompleteness is possible. That's all it is. It's not a sacrifice, it's not some ritual, you don't have to join any groups, it's not about suffering, it's just recognition that separation has not occurred. Incompleteness is impossible. So atonement is restoring right-mindedness, it's dissolving this belief in lack, this belief in loss or separation. Atonement is remembrance of wholeness. It undoes the belief in nothingness that uh by revealing that only wholeness is possible, only wholeness is real. So correction, the correction uh occurs, this atonement correction, at the level of perception, not a level of reality. It it removes the belief in negation, it remove the removes the belief in minus or lack or incompleteness by recognizing that completion is always present. It's always just waiting for our acceptance. It's only a belief that needs correction. It's not a person, it's never a person, it's never reality. You can consider the persons that you know, uh, the persons that uh that you perceive anywhere are reality, just like you. They are the reality, they need no correction. It's just the thoughts that need to be corrected because you're believing in them. See, you're re-believing in them whenever you fight them, even if they seem to come out of another person. You're re-believing in them. You don't want to do that. You want to just perceive it and gently correct it, knowing that there's no correction for the person needed, they're already whole. When you accept this way of atonement, you stop trying to fix the illusion, right? You're not resolving degrees of lack anymore. You're going, wow, nothing is missing, not in me and not in my brother. I'm as God created me. Wholeness is true. Nothing ever happened to change that. This is the acceptance of the atonement. The correction of this error, the belief is in incompleteness. That's what we've been on. Negative numbers is the atonement. Correcting those errors. Yes. Thank you for spelling it out to us, Jesus. We love you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you for joining. All right. We made it through a paragraph, apparently, all the way through paragraph eight. Started out about negative numbers and uh that there's no negative reality. There's only reality, there's no loss. Paragraph nine, sentence one also has a footnote. We'll integrate it. The atonement is the device by which you can free yourself from the past as you perceive it. And then there's a footnote referencing some different areas in the text, which we'll review. So this is placing the atonement in relationship with time. It's talking about the past, the atonement in the past, the illusion of the past, specifically, that seems to be imprisoning the mind. It doesn't even exist in reality. The past does not exist in reality. The mind perceives it and relives it. You know how you know how it's relived through guilt, trauma, nostalgia, just these repeating thought patterns, reliving the past. Atonement actually undoes belief in a real past. It is so much freedom, you guys. I mean, I recommend it. It undoes belief in a past that's real. Like you can still tell stories and stuff. It's just that you don't believe that the past is real. You know you're projecting the past right now. This restores the recognition to our mind that nothing has occurred to change any of us from the way we were created by God. So this, what's being called atonement, it's like a divine mechanism. It collapses time. And when it corrects perception, it collapses time. Perception creates the need for time. When the correction, when the perception is corrected, it's a corrected perception, then it works to collapse time, which is what we want. We don't we don't really want to continue with time. We can actually continue experience without the illusion of time. This doesn't mean to try to act this out or something like that. We just want to be correcting the perception so we're having less time spent in illusions. We can live in the corrected perception, which is beautiful. It doesn't, uh this kind of atonement doesn't fix anything from the past, it doesn't atone for any sins uh in the traditional religious way. It reveals there was no past in which separation ever truly occurred. The entire illusion of time collapses in that recognition. It's showing you right there, it's giving you a visceral experience that nothing real can be threatened and nothing unreal exists. This is the peace of God. So with that footnote, it's pointing us to some other teachings in a course in miracles from chapter uh chapter one and chapters two, chapters one and two. Uh so one of them from miracle principle twenty-six, it's emphasizing that miracles undo the past in the present. Undo the past in the present. And from miracle principle forty-six in paragraph one, the belief in the separation is the only quote sin, and that it has already been corrected. So the belief in separation has already been corrected, and then there's uh from paragraph two, section seven, it clarifies that the atonement is already complete. All that remains is our acceptance. So miracles undo the past in the present. The only sin is separation, and all that remains is our acceptance. So together it's saying the past you think you need to escape never even occurred. That's why there's no escape because it never even occurred. There's no need to escape anything. So the atonement is just your acceptance of the simple fact. That it's just never occurred in reality, and that's how you're freed. So the only purpose of the atonement is to free the mind from a past that never happened, returning the mind to the present where God is. That's where God is in the present moment. Welcome. Thank you for joining. We're on our last hour. Well, there's out of two, so we're halfway through. Yay. Okay, so whatever past thoughts arise, like guilt, regret, nostalgia, fear, notice this is the past as I perceive it. It has no power at all. The atonement already corrected this mistake, accept the truth. Let's read that sentence again. The atonement is the device by which you can free yourself from the past as you perceive it. You could free yourself from the past because there is no past. And so that changes your perception. And you're free. All right, paragraph nine, sentence two. But there are some additional awarenesses which might be helpful. So in the last sentence, he said, the atonement is the device by which you can free yourself from the past as you perceive it. And then he's following that up with, but there are some additional awarenesses which might be helpful. So he's saying that the principle of atonement is still absolute, it's still fully accomplished. It's just that our awareness of how to accept it still needs clarification. He's saying the truth is already complete, but it still needs clarification. He's going to expand our understanding now and make our acceptance of acceptance of the truth easier, more natural, right? Less obstructed by fear. So before moving us into a deeper practice, now he's introducing these additional awarenesses, like stepping stones designed to untangle our confusion, helpful to dissolve our subtle resistance and prepare us to receive what's already been given to us. So this is gentle, you know, this is a gentle preparation. He's setting us up now for a gentle preparation. Okay, we're gonna uh look at these clarifications. So what's what's needed, what you need is not more truth, it's clearer awareness of the conditions that are blocking the truth. He's saying atonement is already done. And your acceptance of the atonement depends on understanding the state of your own mind. So these additional awarenesses are like aids to help us undo the fear. He's like, let me show you how your mind moves. I want to help you recognize when you're open and when you're resisting. See, that's the thing. We're just learning how to recognize when we're open and when we're resisting. Only then can we be effective and being a miracle worker. So instead of striving to achieve atonement somehow, we just receive it. We're guided here to be open to receive it with humility and openness to this instruction from Jesus about how to see it. So this is a good before we even start going in here. Let's uh let's, you know, ask the Holy Spirit and ask Jesus to help us, you know, just in your own mind, reveal the conditions of my mind that block my acceptance of the truth. This is what this is what I want. This is why I'm listening to this, or this is why I'm reading this text. I do not want to hide these. I want to see the conditions in my mind that are blocking my full accept acceptance of the truth. I want to see so I could be healed. This is how we meet Jesus in this intention. You know, he's giving this to us. And when you're shown these additional awarenesses, what Jesus is calling additional awarenesses, don't interpret them as deficiencies. These are tools for your liberation. This is not making you wrong. So right now, you know, you can sit with yourself and ask yourself, and am I willing to let my understanding be gently expanded right now? This is what we're doing. This is not talking about what's known. This is presently unknown to your mind, possibly. So that the acceptance of the atonement becomes effortless. That's what the acceptance is. It's effortless, it's not a forced thing. Okay, so here we go. Let's see what the additional awarenesses are. Readiness is nothing more than the prerequisite for accomplishment. That's paragraph nine, sentence three. Readiness is nothing more than the prerequisite for accomplishment. So he's making a distinction here between readiness and accomplishment. Readiness is a state of willingness, it's an open mind where resistance is softening. Accomplishment is actual acceptance of the healing. That's the point where the mind shifted from illusion to truth. In truth, there's no readiness because there's no resistance. But in time, remember, time is not true. In time, readiness is the first necessary step. Okay, readiness uh doesn't cause healing, but it permits healing to occur by not blocking it. So this is correcting a very common ego assumption here. The sentence says readiness is nothing more than the prerequisite for accomplishment. So the ego assumption is that being ready or intellectually interested in this equals some kind of achievement. Jesus is reminding us here that willingness is the doorway, it's not the destination. You're going to have opportunities to demonstrate your readiness through accomplishment. Readiness acknowledges that truth may be accepted. Accomplishment is actual acceptance of the truth. That's where you're faced with an illusion and you actually accept the truth. And you know, you're faced with illusions all day long, so you get all kinds of opportunities for that. Readiness is the beginning of a process. You don't need to feel guilty for not yet being accomplished. You don't need to grow complacent just because you feel ready. Stay ready. Readiness is like the fertile ground. Stay ready for the accomplishment to be done through you. So for a lot of people, and this is very common, people convince themselves that their willingness means they should already be enlightened, they should already be accomplishing everywhere. You can relax. I'm willing, that is beautiful. I just allow the Holy Spirit now to accomplish what I cannot do for myself. That's the accomplishment. You're just not blocking it. Honor this sense of readiness as it's as if, wow, this is great. Let's cultivate this. Follow it with choice. This is how you cultivate it. Forgiveness, willingness to release judgment, surrendering control. When you feel inspired and you feel open, let the Holy Spirit know I'm ready. I'm letting you lead the way. This keeps your mind in a learning mode. So you're not mistaking this willingness for arrival. That's where you get disappointed. What happened there? Use everything for transformation. Let readiness be your foundation for using everything for transformation. Everything for healing. Then he goes on to say in sentence four, the two should not be confused. So he's already established that readiness is only the prerequisite for accomplishment. Now he's saying, kind of like a warning, there's a should in there. Should not be confused. And that's because the ego loves to appropriate spiritual truth prematurely. That's the only reason. The ego is quick to mistake, inspiration for full embodiment, interest for awakening, readiness for realization. And what Jesus is saying is this confusion is not harmless. It actually creates spiritual stagnation. A mind believing that already achieved what it only glimpsed. See, don't confuse readiness with accomplishment. That's how you become complacent. Watch this. Like, I know this already. We all know this. Obviously, obviously not if it's viewed like that. I got this concept under my belt. And you can follow that up with, and I'm still fucking frustrated, or whatever it is. So that the confusion mistaking the beginning, which is this readiness, as the accomplishment, it actually prevents accepting the atonement. And that's why he's giving this warning. He wants you to accept the atonement as soon as possible. He doesn't want you to get caught up in believing you have some kind of accomplishment. Readiness is like a doorway, it's the rising of willingness. Accomplishments is disappearance of all resistance. That's, you know, it's just, it's like, man, and you you'll see when things are uh when you could say your willingness has been used for accomplishment because the apparent obstacle to peace that they presented for you is not an obstacle anymore. It's a trip. That's the accomplishment. There's just not the thing, whatever it seemed to be, maybe it changed form, maybe it didn't, but it just wasn't an obstacle to peace anymore. So Jesus is seeking to preserve our humility here. It's not self-devaluation if you seem to be uh confusing the two. It's about being open and can to continued guidance, just ready for continued guidance. That's how I like to live it. Um just constantly coming to know the truth, coming into knowing, not um leaning on some concepts, right? The concepts help you to come to know, but that's really uh it's like a revelation, constant being in constant revelation, let's say it's an awareness, it's a knowing that you can't really put words to, but you constantly want to be coming into that knowing, that's what's the uh state of unity and this beautiful celebration of bliss in the mind. So celebrate that readiness, just don't assume you're done. Instead, move into being active in the moment, actively uh noticing when there's blocks to a complete surrender and embrace of the truth so that you can surrender again, you can come into more surrender. Right. I see you, Kalama. I'll be with you in a few minutes. So it's like I am willing, I am here, I'm available for all that willingness calls forth right now. Notice where you may believe, because I understand it, I've mastered it. Right? Because I desire healing, healing has already fully occurred. Forget about I've mastered it. The mastery of love is in the moment. There's no I to master it in the first place. So this is opening a channel. Jesus is helping here to open a channel in our hearts for deeper transformation. Remaining a student of the Holy Spirit. And whenever you feel like you're spiritually advanced, go to remaining as a student. That's what I do. I get the sense I'm spiritually advanced all the time. I actually get the perception I've never met a person more spiritually advanced than me. Okay, I would love to. I'm saying I would love to. Um, but I'm going, this too is part of my dream. It's part of what I'm projecting. And I I notice because you know, I've I've just experimented a lot, and playing with any kind of spiritual superiority thoughts uh makes me feel guilty and afraid and stuff like that. So watching those thoughts and recognizing that they don't really mean anything, it's just the way the dream is presented to myself. That's how it's unfolding. It doesn't really mean anything. There's no separation between me and any other person. Maybe I just do really well with specialness. That's why I'm giving that kind of perception.

unknown: 1:17:12

I don't know.

SPEAKER_00: 1:17:13

It's fun. All right. I got a question here from Kalama. I love you. Aloha. When the house is not over our heads, I tend to believe past thoughts of lack. Perhaps there are some great questions to ask the Holy Spirit for a guide for my next transformations healings. Okay. Yeah. Ask the Holy Spirit. Because you know, you're going, you're taking on this idea of a roof over your head as if it's something that you have to do. And you know, truly, you have never done anything. You're getting the perception of a possibility that you might not have a roof over your head while you need a roof over your head. You're projecting that from a sense of lack that's a that you know you're actively holding up right now. Uh, there's no reason uh to hold it up other than fear. So you're fearing and you're and you're resisting against your own feelings instead of just embracing your feelings. When you embrace your feeling, you you realize those thoughts don't even have any meaning. This is only a feeling journey. There is no house, there is no roof. It doesn't really make any sense. None of these things make any sense. Uh but what you're feeling, that's your experience. And you know, that needs to make more sense to you, really, because what you're experiencing can be either embraced or feared. Those are the only two options embraced or feared. So uh so if you're going, okay, I'm getting a sense that I might not have a roof over my head, I'm getting a thought that I might not have a roof over my head. Whoa, look at that feeling. Okay, the thought about not having the roof over my head, that makes absolutely no sense because I'm only going to perceive what I need. I'm only going to experience what I need. This feeling is what's really this is true for me right now. I'm feeling this. I'm getting the sense that I'm feeling this feeling. That's where you make your choice. Love or fear. Fear resists the feeling by thinking the thoughts that say where the feeling is coming from are true. Love embraces the feeling just like it is, and that will uh change all circumstances, even in the field, because the field, uh, or you can say the external world is only reflecting your state of mind. See how your state of mind is changing here? This is where you're taking back the authority. Yeah, I love you. Thank you. Welcome back, Lori. I love you guys. Thank you for joining everyone. Aloha, Sarah. I can't say aloha to all of you, but man, it's such a joy that you're joining. So, all right, on to paragraph nine, sentence five. As soon as a state of readiness occurs, there is always some will to accomplish. Okay, let me start over on that one. As soon as a state of readiness occurs, there is always some will to accomplish. But this is by no means undivided. So he's talking about the state of well readiness. With the state of readiness, there's a will to accomplish, but this is not undivided. It's not undivided will. So here's another one of these. What did he call these additional awarenesses? This is another one of those additional awarenesses. Sentence five. So he's revealing this in the early stages for us, in the early stages of spiritual willingness. Okay, he's saying always includes a genuine will to accomplish. There's an i there's an authentic desire to know God in there, to accept healing, to awaken. Yet he's immediately adding, but this is by no means undivided. This is just an honest diagnosis of the human conditions. This is saying the mind is split. Part of the mind is responding to the truth, part of it is clinging to illusion. The will at this point has not become single. All right, the ego's purpose and the Holy Spirit's purpose both seem to be active in you. One wants to reinforce identity and form, and the other one is constantly inviting you beyond form. So Jesus is naming this not to condemn anyone. This is for comfort. If you perceive this, right, the will is divided. You seem to be going back and forth. Readiness is open the gate to God, but you're recognizing okay, fear is still guarding this shit. You're you're still accustomed to thinking with the ego. So you experience resistance, you experience vacillation and ambivalence. You're not really certain yet. This mixture doesn't mean you're failing or anything. It's just evidence that this transformation of your will is underway. It's begun. And time is within the Holy Spirit's uh authority, power, whatever. Um you don't need to worry about how long it takes or anything. Readiness is always having both love and fear, desire and resistance coming back and forth, never both at the same time, of course. They don't exist simultaneously, and one of them doesn't exist. That's the fair side. So it's indicating a movement toward truth. It's just that it's partial because your mind still believes something outside of God has value. So the ego doesn't get eradicated by your willingness, but it does get exposed by it over time. This explains why there's a process to awakening. Your will is shifting allegiance right now, and that shift is like tension until it's complete. It's like waking up for people can be really discombobulating. They try to go back to illusions many times, but that doesn't last. You can't stay in that because it's like once you've walked through a certain door, the doorway is closed to go back the other way. You can only imagine yourself, you know, sinking back into illusions, but your mind has already been transformed. So it's kind of just a way of like killing time doing something like that. It's a movement toward the truth, it's just partial because it's believing something outside of God has value. You know, for me, I just enjoyed the discomfort. I know I'm just like, oh, I know this discomfort is holy, and just breathe into it and just keep on breathing with the discomfort and embracing the discomfort. You know, it's really at one point you get this is all just feeling. The experience is totally feeling, that's all it is. There's nothing else going on here. So when you notice yourself swinging back and forth, like devotion, doubt, joy, contraction, don't think that you're backsliding. Because, you know, really your mind is so powerful here. When you recognize those fluctuations are just a natural rhythm of a mind learning, then it becomes that much more effective in your learning because you're just this is how you express your willingness. This is really how you do it. You just be willing to see everything is a blessing. Wow, this is such a blessing. Wow, I see that contraction. Whoa, I feel see how fearful I felt back there. Wow, I see how I blew up over there. Part of your mind wants to accomplish what God wills, the rest is still fearing it. There's no need to judge it, just offer that part that still fear still fears that feels fearful to the light. So this helps in not trying to hide it from yourself. Jesus wants to expose all these things so you could see them and bring them to awareness rather than just having them lingering, taking more time. Um, you know, he's answering the call, like, you know, our minds are just kind of like, come on, we want to wake up fast. And this is really, you know, he's showing us a quicker way to waking up from the dream. Not waking up just in the dream. There's that part too, but waking up from dreaming entirely, which is our goal. So every recognition of inner division, which within yourself can be an invitation to wholeness if you let it and then accept the invitation. Oh, you recognize, oh, it's an invitation to wholeness. That's all it is. Any kind of guilt pops up even for something you did five minutes ago, whatever. Holy Spirit, I see my divided will. I want to want only truth. I want to want only peace, even it's like a prayer, and that unifies you with that force. Notice where you feel a pull towards love or fear. Remember, you're only relating with your feelings. And think of what love might do here. Notice the feeling and and you know, focus on what love might do here and allow that to be seen without judgment. You know, when you trust that seeing is part of the healing, then you're just happy with whatever you seem to be seeing in the moment. You're not judging it. Kalama likes that discomfort is holy, natural method of mind learning. Great one for me. Yay, I'm so happy about that. Yeah. All right. Paragraph nine, sentence six. The state does not imply more than the potential for a shift of will. Okay, the state, uh, the state of readiness does not imply more than a potential for a shift of will. So we're still on that state of readiness, which started in sentence one. Uh, maybe it was sentence three. I don't know. So he's clarifying readiness is not the transformation, it's the potential for transformation. It signifies that the mind's open enough to allow for this possibility of choosing differently. That's what the readiness is. This is a crucial distinction. The ego wants you to believe that feeling open is the same as being healed. Jesus is reminding us here that spiritual progress isn't measured by moments of inspiration alone. It's measured by an actual shift of the will, the mind choosing God instead of with the ego when it normally chooses with the ego. This readiness, the way it's describing it, is threshold energy, a poised state, right? Like standing ready. Jesus would say in the Bible uh to stay awake to his disciples. There was one part where he, in particular, he was saying, stay awake, and he comes back and they're all sleeping. Yeah. I find that to be like a parable. He's saying, stay awake, stay awake, don't go to sleep. This is threshold energy. Stay in this poised state of readiness. And when you believe you've you believe that readiness signifies that you've stepped into certainty, then you're not ready. Readiness is not the miracle. It's the mind becoming available for the miracle. So he talks about potential here. The state does not imply more than the potential for a shift, a shift of will. Potential is like power in reserve. It's got to be activated through a decision. Readiness means you're capable of changing direction. The Holy Spirit has an opening when you're ready. But the will still must be tuned toward the truth. Your will must be tuned toward the truth to be choosing the truth over the illusion that's being presented to you. So this is emphasizing our agency. The atonement's been accomplished, but its acceptance is still waiting for you. It's already been accomplished. It requires a shift of will. So don't stop at readiness, but engage it. Follow it with a choice. Speak to the Holy Spirit. Invite reinterpretation. Offer grievance. I offer this grievance to you. I don't want to see my brother like this. I see my brother as a as a threat. I see my brother as if they're sad. I see my brother as if they're broke. Ask to see it differently. I'm ready. Please shift my will. I accept the atonement now. Make your readiness practical and active by allowing yourself to move into that decision. So this is a point where we're learning how to choose fully. And it's gonna come, opportunities are gonna come just through the particulars of the life. Am I willing to let potential become actual by allowing it to shift my will in the moment? This is how we're actually participating. It's not like, oh, okay, nice to know, good to learn this shit. Now I'm just gonna uh go on pretending like I know it all, that I'm not coming into the knowing. All right, paragraph nine, sentence seven. Confidence cannot develop fully until mastery has been accomplished. Hmm, that's fun. So here's a divine law of the mind. True confidence is the result of unified will. It's not a prerequisite for it. It's the result of unified will, it's not a prerequisite. So confidence arises when the mind has consistently chosen truth over illusion. That's just natural. So it stops entertaining conflicting desires because it's the mind is confident in the truth because it's chosen so many times, truth over illusion. So the ego believes we must feel confidence first. This is undoing an ego illusion, a major ego illusion here. The ego illusion is that we have to feel confidence first in order to choose the Holy Spirit. But that's the opposite. Confidence is not what leads you to mastery, confidence is what flows from mastery when your will is undivided. So it says confidence cannot develop fully until mastery has been accomplished. As long as your will is conflicted, your confidence will appear unstable. That's okay. You still can choose truth in the moment. If the truth isn't unstable, your conflicted will makes you appear unstable. But because the truth is true, you can still choose it. And then by choosing it, that leads to mastery, which leads to complete confidence. So mastery in this context isn't meaning personal perfection. That's not like that. It means your mind consistently chooses to be guided by the Holy Spirit. It stopped choosing against itself. It just got to the point of this is that's enough choosing against myself. I'm just gonna stay right here under the Holy Spirit's guidance. No doubt has any foothold on my mind anymore. That's what mastery is. It's not self-assurance in any kind of egoic sense, like I have to keep this, which I've earned, kind of thing. But it's your assurance that God's nature is unchangeable and my identity with him is unshakable. So confidence isn't a feeling you have to get to, like you have to try to generate. It's an actual state that dawns on you. You're not in conflict about what's real anymore. So before mastery, your confidence flickers because it's still being evaluated through perception. After mastery, confidence is constant. It just rests on knowledge, it rests on the truth, it does not rest on any perception. In fact, every perception is used to demonstrate what the what's true is true. So this is Jesus' reassurance to you. If your confidence fluctuates, there is nothing wrong with you. That's not the actual sentence that he said, but that's what he wanted me to share with you right now. The sentence here is confidence cannot develop fully until mastery has been accomplished. So instead of waiting to feel strong or certain or spiritual before true choosing choosing the truth, you choose the truth right now, in the midst of uncertainty. This is training your mind. This is mind training. Every time you choose, your mind is trained to align more with the Holy Spirit. And the confidence grows organically, just like that. You see, you don't need confident confidence to choose truth. Your confidence grows from choosing truth. Trust this process. Confidence is what you receive when your resistance is undone. So an ego way would be to get you to wait for greater certainty or clarity or confidence before you can actually commit to the truth. You don't need any of this. All the paths, all of what's a pet the paths taught you. It taught you to learn about nonsense, who you are and what you are. Forget about that. Let confidence come after choosing. Just choose truth now. So hooray. Paragraph 10. Am I gonna do paragraph 10? It is pretty long. I could do part of it. We have 20 minutes left. I don't think I'll get to the whole thing. It's a big paragraph. All right, we'll get started though. Paragraph 10, sentence one. We began this section with an attempt to correct the fundamental human error that fear can be mastered. Hmm. I love that. So, according to A Course in Miracles, there's two emotions: love and fear. Love is what God created, it's real, eternal, unchanging, and cannot be threatened. Fear is what the ego made. It's not real, it's a belief in the absence of love. Okay, so this is correcting the fundamental human error that fear can be mastered. And the section is called the mastery of love. So fear isn't anything that exists on its own. It's not a force, it's a misperception. It's for it's uh an effect of choosing separation, it's a veil. So that's why to attempt to master fear is to treat it as if it has reality. This is the core error the human mind makes. Look at this. Ego says you must fight fear, manage fear, heal fear, control fear, analyze fear. But Jesus is saying, fear is nothing. Only love is real. You do not master fear, you choose love. When you try to master fear, you're really declaring it's real to your own mind. And when you choose love, you recognize fear never was. These are the two choices that we have in every moment. How we're going to meet our feelings. Love is mastered through accepting your feelings. Fear is undone through this recognition. You don't heal fear, you just stop choosing fear. It's nothing, it's not even anything to heal. When it arises, it's not a problem to solve. Fear is not a problem to solve. It's just a sign. Let it be a sign that you're choosing against love right now in this moment and can change your mind about that. You're choosing one of two teachers, let's say the Holy Spirit, which interprets everything through love, or the ego, which interprets everything through fear, which is the illusion. Every feeling you have is either an extension of love or a call for love. Every feeling. This is all that's what it's all about. There's nothing else going on here. There's no external world. The external world is like a painting, it's an expression of an internal world. It is not real. Whenever you sense you're afraid, anxious, threatened. Don't try to overcome that. You don't have to overcome it. You don't have to distract yourself. Recognize it's a choice for misperception. Notice I've chosen wrongly. Because I'm not at peace, I know I've chosen wrongly. Instead, I choose the truth of love. So this shifts your teacher. It takes you from the teacher being the ego to this teacher being the Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit, I must have chosen wrongly. I am not at peace. See? And fear dissolves not because you've mastered it or conquered it or anything like that, but because you withdrew belief from it. You just shifted your teacher. See? Am I willing to let this be replaced by love? Which is the only thing that's even real? What makes sense to you? Next sentence. Paragraph 10, sentence two. The correction was that only love can be mastered. So this is a total reversal of the ego's premise that fear is real. The correction was that only love can be mastered. Only love is real. So only it can be mastered. Meaning, what does it mean to master love? It's fully accepted, it's fully embodied and expressed, extended, expressed through you. It's not about controlling love. It's aligned, it's being aligned with love as your only reality and your only will. That's the mastery of love. That means you're not divided in your loyalty. You don't choose against love. Love is just your natural state of awareness. It's not something you reach or generate, it's not an achievement of the personal self. It's just remembering right now your true identity in God. Nothing but love exists. Remembering that right now. It's the restoration of your knowing, it's devotion. It's the complete return of awareness of the fact that there's only love. That's what mastery of love is. Love is reality. It can be known, trusted, practiced, experienced consistently. Fear can't be mastered because it's not real. Love can be mastered by you because it's what you are. Basically, to master it is to stop abandoning it in the moment. You now let me just let you know again how this happens when how you abandon love in the moment, so you can see. And and you know, don't judge yourself. Of course, watch it. When you when you see it, you learn totally. So you get the sense of a fearful feeling coming up, and you you know, you try to abandon, uh, abandon love by listening to the thoughts. That's what it is. It's listening to the thoughts that tell you why you feel whatever feeling you're feeling, frustrated, upset for any reason, sad, whatever. It's saying why you're feeling what you're feeling. Don't believe that. Don't believe in those thoughts. You're not feeling upset for that reason at all. That's projected from a belief. To embrace the feeling and not listen to the thought is to allow these patterns to collapse. You don't have to um fight with those thoughts at all. Just turn your attention to the feeling effect of them. That's what takes your mind off of ruminating on the thoughts. Turn your attention to the feeling effect, become aware that this feeling is an effect of believing a thought right now. You can practice this in any situation, every situation. Am I choosing love or am I choosing fear? How am I meeting my feeling? The mind chooses against love. It feels like compression in the body's energy field. This is this is the certain sense that's awareness of union. Becomes compression with that. Let the uh let the channel be open by seeing, just by seeing, noticing the hesitation, noticing the specialness, noticing the judgment. That's what allows you to embrace everything, and that's choosing love. And in an embracing way. Even if you are ready for revelation, though, that does not mean that you have in any way mastered that form of communication. That's revelation that he's talking about. So he's making another distinction between readiness and mastery. Now it's in regard to revelation. So revelation in a course in miracles means direct communication with God. It's beyond perception, words, thought, form. It's just direct communication with God. I like to stay in revelation all day long. And the way I do that is that I just don't listen to ego thoughts, any thoughts that tell me about my stupid ass life or the world. I'm just like, that is not even interesting. I know that, you know, Jesus has informed me before. I want your mind open for revelation. You don't need to be thinking about your life. Let your life just be taken care of. Okay. So revelation is not something that you achieve. It's something that just automatically flows when your mind is free from fear. Being ready for revelation means the mind has become open, it's undefended enough for that kind of direct awareness. You know, it's it's something revelation. Let's say it's it's like you've achieved another awareness. I don't know how to say this. You've been opened to another level of awareness, and a broader way of seeing. Um, and it's not something that you can explain. But the effects of having gone through that revelation, they get demonstrated through your expression. So they have real the revelation has real effects. So being ready for revelation means your mind's open, you're undefended, you're not trying to figure out your life or anything. Notice those thoughts that keep on cycling around. Mastery of love, that's uh where revelation comes in. It doesn't occur simply because the mind is willing. Um, but the mind that stays ready receives the gift of revelation, not because it accomplished something, it's just that there's that opening there, and this is who you are. It's not like God bestows some reward on you or something, but this is like this is just who you are. It's just natural. It's also a gift and not an accomplishment. It's a gift, not a reward, though. Like, okay, your mind has been open enough. It's a naturally flowing through where there's the space for it to flow through, for revelation to flow through. So you may be open right now to a burst of divine awareness, but maybe not able to sustain that state or remain identified with it. That's okay. It'll be sustained, your mastery will be sustained in time. It's just now, the moment now, this is where you choose love, choose to embrace your feeling and not project it by believing the thoughts about it. You can be ready to glimpse the truth, but still identified with the ego most of the time. This is okay. This is why revelation is described as temporary within the dream. It comes and then that's why you know you're constantly coming to know, constantly want to come to know this stuff. Um uh come to know the the truth of who you are, which is unity, which is still in your heart, which is another way of saying it's in your right mind. It just comes, the um revelations come in wherever fear is absent. So we're fading away the fear. So Jesus here is correcting any notion that spiritual openness means spiritual completion. Don't confuse moments of inspirations or holy experiences with complete awakening. Ego wants to hurry up and get to the end, which is actually going to make you take more time, which is not what you want. That's why Jesus is compassionately giving this to us. So instead of clinging to any holy experience or any openness or realization, all that stuff passes, anyways. Ask how can I become more consistently aligned with love so that revelation can naturally occur, so that my mind can be free and clear. And this is just right now coming to know the stabilization of love, stabilizing presence of love. All right. Looks like we have a question or a comment over here on Zoom. Wayne, how cute! Thank you. He says you're such a blessing to this world. Oh, thank you, but thank you so much, Wayne. Ah, oh, thank you. It's so fun. I'm a I'm overjoyed to do it. Thank you so much. Okay, paragraph 10, sentence four. Mastery of love necessarily involves a much more complete confidence in the ability than you have as yet attained. More complete confidence in the ability than you've attained so far. So here Jesus is explaining why you have not mastered love. Your confidence is not yet whole because your will is split, partly aligned with the truth, partly aligned with the with the illusion. So your confidence is fluctuating. This doesn't mean you're failing at anything, it just means you haven't fully accepted what you are in truth. That's all. To master love is to know your true identity so completely that you never waver in your awareness of it. See, it's to live without any doubt in the power of love to sustain you, guide you, protect you. It's complete freedom from any upset feelings. It's complete confidence. And you know, it's freedom with upset feelings because, like, an upset feeling will arise and it'll be like, oh, good. It's not like, ah, get that away. What's that doing here? This is not self-confidence in the egoic sense, it's God confidence, it's certainty that love is the only reality. So any feeling can arise and it's welcome. It doesn't require any effort, but it does require the absence of doubt. So Jesus isn't rebuking you here, he's stating a fact. You're still learning to trust love without reserve, you're still learning to rely on love all by itself. It doesn't need anything else. You're still learning that love can't fail you. So you can't claim mastery until that confidence is complete. You can, but you know, you're just making yourself take more time. Not recognizing what mastery is. Like you don't have any need to waver anymore. Love is always reliable, but your confidence in it is not reliable yet. Mastery isn't uh isn't a state where you've increased love, it's where trust is complete. So this sentence is acknowledging your readiness while encouraging you could to continue toward this fullness of confidence, this full confidence where no fear, no fear remains. So every moment of doubt, so if you you know, when you recognize confidence, your conference, confidence wavering, that's a moment of doubt. That's always an opportunity to shift into reliance on love. So those become your strengths, you know. One part in the Course in Miracles, it talks about how your weaknesses are actually God's strengths, and this is where it plays into it. There's these moments of doubt. You're recognizing, oh, this is one of those opportunities. That's doubt. How can I rely on love more instead of judging yourself? I know. I've done it a bunch of times. That's why I could laugh about it, right? I saw pretty quickly though, because I just saw go, man, I don't have to play into that. But that's great. I love getting out of shit like that. I'm like, huh, I don't have to believe that one bit. That that doubt is really true about me. This is an opportunity to see that, even that thought as a blessing. Holy Spirit, show me where I still believe love is not enough. Help me remember that love is all powerful, all-present, and always certain. You choose to trade to place your trust in the truth over what's temporary and false, and that's how your confidence will grow. That cultivates the confidence. So notice wherever you're relying on control or personal effort or defense, sometimes you know, I'll recognize, like, I'll just see a person walking by and I'll see them defending themselves to themselves like they're talking to another person. Notice where you're doing that in your mind. You have nothing to defend. Rest in love certainty. Let love be completely sufficient. There's no one here doing anything to you, adding or taking away from you. So that was sentence four. Okay, I'm gonna make some notations for myself right here. I just looked up and realized it's 5 p.m. over here, Pacific time. I love you guys. Thank you so much for joining. I really appreciate you being with me for these ACIM deep dives. I will be back again on Monday for wisdom dialogues, a little bit of a different format in case you don't know. It's basically just a stream of consciousness. I've been uh practicing and studying a course in miracles for about 11 years, and I've been putting it into practice, and I've been having these dialogues with the spirit, and I just kind of like open them up for the I open them up uh for everyone to hear. It's like uh an awakening mind on loudspeaker. So I love it. It's really fun when you join me. I will have one more week here in Sedona, so I'll be going in Wednesday next week, Monday wisdom dialogues, Wednesday, a course in miracles deep dive. And after that, I'm gonna take a break. I'm not sure how many weeks. It could just be like one or it could be like four weeks. I'm not sure. But if you're connected with me on Zoom and social media and um Substack, wherever you like to. Connect with me. Yeah, it'll be uh it'll show there. So yay. So next week, come on back next week, three to five. And if you have any questions or anything, always let me know. You can send me questions right there on my website. Hopejohnson.org has a chat box. Also, uh, you can donate to me on my website. You can set up one-to-ones with me and other services and stuff is on my website. Lots of free stuff. These are these um chats are free. Uh ACIM deep dive. I love you. Thank you. These ACIM deep dives are and then uh the wisdom dialogues, and also I've got ACIM daily lessons going. I think I've completed now and uploaded through like 337, and there's only 365. So I got a few more to go. I love doing them. I get great feedback from you guys. Thank you. Um, I appreciate you so much. I can't even say. Oh, thank you. I appreciate you too, Christina. All right, until next time. Mahalo, aloha, and a hoo-e-ho. Yay.