Gowithin.net’s Interview with the Electrifying Gary Renard.
by Charles Hurley
gowithin.net correspondent
A rock star of a different kind graced Baltimore, MD fairly recently. His name, Gary Renard, best selling author of the books A Disappearance of the Universe (DU) and Your Immortal Reality (YIR). We at gowithin.net were able to catch-up and spend some time with Gary prior to his scheduled workshop (please see The Gary Renard Experience).
GoW: Hello Gary! Welcome to Baltimore! In a nutshell, please describe the principles of A Course in Miracles (ACIM or The Course for short)?
Gary: Whoa! That's a lot. ACIM for me is the most interesting spiritual teaching for several reasons. It comes from Jesus (J for short). It's like J speaking in the first person. It's channeled, of course. It says things that other spiritual teachers and teachings in the world are not saying. He is not saying the same things as everyone else is. It's not like the message has changed. It's what he has always said. People lost the message. It got lost 2000 years ago, especially within the first 200 years after J's existence.
J’s message in ACIM says that there's a choice to be made between two things. These are the only meaningful choices. One is spirit. This is not the old fashioned idea of spirit. This is perfect oneness. It would be synonymous with God in Heaven. Ultimately, we are no different from God. It's perfect oneness that is whole, full, and complete. It does not have any break or division. Interestingly, you see J talking about the same thing 2000 years ago in the original Gospel of Thomas (originally a sayings scripture document that was destroyed by the Church in 386 AD). J was a very Eastern thinker. The religion based on him, Christianity, was developed later and was Western in thought. It was not an Eastern thought system like J taught in Gospel of Thomas. J talked about wholeness (interestingly, the word holy comes from the word whole). The kind of spirit J was talking about was full, whole and complete. There was nothing missing, nothing left out. That’s what perfect oneness is.
So, J was not talking about the old-fashioned ideas of spirit because what most people think of as spirit is kind of like an individual identity thing thinking they have a soul that sets them apart from others, which is a separation idea. So, one of the distinctions I want to make is that this idea of spirit in ACIM has something in common with the new kind of physics (quantum physics) which teaches that everything is one and that everything is connected and cannot really separate one thing from anything else. So, you are connected to someone without any separation between anything. That’s what this idea of spirit would be like. That’s the idea of spirit Jesus always had. He said in the Gospel of Thomas things like “I am the one that comes from what is whole” and “therefore I say to you that when one is whole there is light, but when one is divided they will be filled with darkness.” I think what he is trying to say is that you can’t be a little bit whole. You have to choose one or the other. Your allegiance in your mind has to be for wholeness (what spirit really is) or division. Now, if your mind is divided, it is filled with darkness. If it is whole, it will be filled with light. That’s the first thing to remember. Now you make a choice between the 2 things…one being spirit and the other thing is what is not spirit.
Some people mistakenly think ACIM is a dualistic system because it talks about the word of God and the world of separation. No, it’s not dualistic because of what it’s saying is that between the two seeming worlds (the world of God or the world of separation/time and space), only one of them is true. The true world is the world of God. The world of God is a non-dualistic system. It actually teaches oneness. Only perfect oneness of spirit is real and nothing else is real. The Course’s idea of forgiveness is when one is making a choice between spirit and anything else. Anything else other than true spirit is not perfect oneness with God. You look past the anything else and look past the illusion of the world of time and space to what people really are, which is perfect oneness and that is spirit. J puts it in the Course’s introduction that “nothing real can be threatened”. What is real is spirit and that’s perfect oneness.
When nothing unreal exists, that’d be anything else, any bodies you see, any separation, or division of any kind. That’s what we are overlooking. That’s where nothing unreal exists. ACIM says that there is no world. When I said that the Course is saying something different from other teachings, it is saying there is no world. Other teachings are trying to fix up the world. But, what J is trying to do is not to get us to fix up the world. J is trying to get us to wake up from the dream that there is a world. That’s what true enlightenment is. Enlightenment is a true awakening to what you really are and where you really are instead of what you thought you were.
Quantum forgiveness, just like the ideas of spirit in ACIM, is very much in harmony with the new physics where the old fashioned idea of forgiveness was a separation idea. As I mentioned earlier, people think they have individual souls and that when they die there is this part of them that goes on that afterwards. The thing they think that goes on afterwards looks suspiciously like the body they’d just left. That thought is still a separation idea. The Course’s idea of spirit has no separation in it. It is oneness that’s true for the Course’s brand forgiveness. It’s not the old fashioned kind of forgiveness. The old fashioned kind of forgiveness is also a separation idea because you are forgiving someone who is separate from you and you are forgiving them because they really did something. That’s the world’s old fashioned and an outdated way of looking at forgiveness. The Course’s way of looking at forgiveness is, once again, very much in harmony with the new physics because if there is no separation then what you are doing when you are forgiving someone else is forgiving yourself but it doesn’t look that way. It may appear that you and I are separate from each other but that’s a trick of time and space. In fact, time and space are just separation ideas. Thinking that you have more than one space (perceiving that you are over there while I am over here) is a separation idea. You have different time periods. The idea of a yesterday, today, and a tomorrow is another separation idea. It makes different units of time out of what is really one instant of time. What we think of as the past, present, and future are really happening simultaneously. ACIM calls this the tiny tick of time. This tiny tick of time isn’t even real. The point is that it all happened at once. You can’t separate one period of time from another period of time. It all happened all at once. The new kind of forgiveness doesn’t forgive people because they are separate from you and that they have really done anything to you. All that does is make the idea of separation real in the unconscious mind. What ACIM’s brand of forgiveness does is forgiving people because they are not separate from us. We forgive people because they haven’t really done anything, we forgive them because we are the ones who made them up in the first place.
ACIM teaches us that what we are seeing is actually coming from us. The people we see out there are doing all these terrible things in the world that we thought was so bad and worthy of our judgement and condemnation are actually a projection coming from our unconscious mind. ACIM teaches that projection follows denial. Psychologists say the same thing. When you deny something (which is the contents of our unconscious mind), it has to go somewhere. It appears to go outside of us. Projection occurs when that something looks like it is outside of us. ACIM teaches that “projection makes perception”. What that means is that we are actually being something that we ourselves made. This occurs because we denied it and forgot that we made it. People go through their whole lives, from the moment they are born to the moment that they die, thinking that what they are seeing is real. They think that there is a world outside of them and that it is being done to them. They are living in a condition of effect because they believe things are being done to them. They even believe God created the world. So, if God made the world, then it means the world was done to you. Which means you are a victim of the world you see. As ACIM teaches, in one of the workbook lessons, “that I am not a victim of the world I see”. A reason why you are not a victim of the world you see is because you made it. You can go through life seeing this lifetime and think it is real, but it’s actually a movie coming from your unconscious mind. This movie (a projection) has been denied first and then you forgot that you made it. You think that what you are seeing is outside of you which puts you at the effect of things (nature). Now, you are a victim because the world is being done to you. But, ACIM says that this is “a course in cause and not effect”. It is saying the world is not being done to you, it (the world) is being done by you.
Quantum forgiveness is justified when you see that you made the world. If the world is being done to you, then forgiveness would never be justified because it would mean that God really did it and that the people in our lives really did things to you. So forgiveness would not be justified in that case. But, if the world is being done by you, then what you are seeing is coming from you. If the world is not being done to you, it is being done by you, then forgiveness is justified. That’s why ACIM says “the secret of salvation is but this, that you are doing this to yourself when you remember and remembering is the hardest part”, especially when the stuff hits the fan. But when you remember that you are the one who made it all up, it changes everything. It’s like when ACIM says in one of the workbook lessons, “if I forgive I will see this differently”. The sooner you remember that the person who is yelling at you and is seemingly causing you to be upset, is the sooner you remember that you made them up. It changes everything. It can be like watching a movie screen. If I am at the movies, people who have read my books know that I like going to the movies, and if somebody on the screen started yelling at me, I wouldn’t take it seriously. I wouldn’t worry about it, I wouldn’t be upset by it. Well, that’s what this can be. That’s what life can be like. When people start yelling at us, instead of taking it seriously, you can crack-up or just laugh.