Gowithin.net’s Interview with the Electrifying Gary Renard.
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{GoW: Just like what you did in Wisconsin when you were confronted by the “Guru” of ACIM and his cult ministry.}
Gary continues: Yeah, just like that. Because now, I remember that this is my movie. “The secret of salvation is remembering that I am doing this to myself.” I made it all up in the first place because I wanted what I thought was in my mind to be seen outside of it. But, ACIM teaches that “ideas leave not their source”. It may look like it’s left you or looks outside you. No, it’s actually still in the mind. The fact that it looks like it left you is an optical illusion. In fact, Einstein once described a person’s experience as an optical delusion of consciousness. It may look like it’s out there but it’s not really out there because ACIM teaches once again that “there is no world”. The Course attempts to teach us the importance of this central thought. Well, if you instantly remember that you are the one who’s making it up now, then you are coming from a position of cause. Forgiveness is justified once that happens.
That is why ACIM teaches that anger is never justified. It doesn’t say that you will never get angry. The reason you remember that anger is not justified is because as soon as you remember that you are the one who made it all up, you just stop reacting and you start looking at it differently and that is what forgiveness naturally leads to. It leads to a totally different mindset. It leads to inner peace because now you realize that nothing is really happening, it just looked that way. That kind of forgiveness, if you can get into the habit of doing it and that’s why it is important to do the Workbook of the Course, is important because it retrains the mind to forgive instead of judge. It’s very simple and easy to fall back into a reactionary way of looking at the world. I think it takes a lot of discipline and a lot of practice to get into the habit of stopping yourself from reacting and changing your mind and remembering you are the one who made it all up. The Course says “no one reacts to figures in a dream he knows that he is dreaming”. So, the instant he sees them (the people, situations, etc.) as they are (as things he made them up to project his guilt outside of himself), then he stops reacting.
Earlier I said that the Course teaches that “it’s a course in cause, not effect”. Well, it also, says “seek not to change the world, seek rather to change your mind about the world”. Now, there’s an irony in there. The irony is that if you change your mind about the world, then you are dealing from a position of cause and sometimes the effect may change also. But, the change in the effect happens naturally and that’s not the focus of the Course ever. That’s why it says it’s a Course in cause not effect. It’s never about trying to change the effect. It’s always about changing your mind about the effect. “Remember seek not to change the world, rather, seek to change your mind about the world.” It doesn’t mean that you don’t live a normal life and you don’t do the same kinds of things other people do. People ask me what I should do and I say be normal, live a normal life and at the same time that you’re doing it, yeah, you can change your mind about things and practice forgiveness. It’s kind of like forgive as you go. As you go along, you are forgiving and remembering the truth as you go along and what that does is that it undoes the idea of separation in the unconscious mind. It starts to return you, every time you start to forgive someone (just like Jesus did), to a condition of wholeness and oneness. You forgive someone and it’s almost like you are rejoining with yourself. So you are becoming whole again. You are becoming one again. You are going from a condition of separation back to a condition of oneness and wholeness and that is spirit. You are actually returning to spirit by forgiving bodies, forgiving the idea of being a body, and realizing you are not a body to what you really are (perfect spirit).
It leads to an experience of being spirit instead of being a body and that’s the goal the Course is directed toward. It’s an experience. That is the answer to all of our questions. It cannot be found intellectually. It can only be found by experience. The experience of ACIM is directed toward an experience of what you really are. There is one point in the Workbook of the Course where Jesus talks about all the difficult questions that people have about it. The Workbook lesson says that, “the ego will ask many questions that this Course has not asked. For example, “ how did the impossible occur?” Which is a reference to the question people ask about “how did I get here?”. The Course would say that you are not here. Well, then the person would say, yeah, I know that, but “how did I get here?”. Then ACIM would say again that you are not here. That answer isn’t going to satisfy people. What will satisfy people is an experience of where they really are, which blows away the questions. So, in that same Workbook lesson, J replies to that question with “There is no answer, only an experience. Seek only this and do not let theology delay you”. What he is saying is that the experience of being one with God is the answer to all of our questions and all of our problems.
In fact, according to A Course in Miracles, there is only one problem and that’s the idea that we’ve separated ourselves from God. It also suggests that there is only one solution, which is exactly the same solution that we saw 2000 years ago when talked about the prodigal son. The solution is to go home. That’s the only solution. There is one problem, which is separation, and one solution, which is to go home and the way to go home is through this kind of forgiveness that I’m talking about. ACIM says the “means of atonement is forgiveness”. When you think about it, atonement means forgiveness. How can you get to the end without utilizing the means, yet you need the means to get to the end? A lot of students of ACIM want to just skip to the end. They don’t want to do the forgiveness work that leads to the experience we are talking about. But, it is that experience that is brought about by forgiveness. That it is why ACIM says that universal theology is impossible. But, a universal experience is not only possible, but necessary. It’s this that the Course is directed.
So, in a nutshell, that’s the basics of ACIM. It’s undoing the idea of bodies and separation, which is why it says nothing unreal exists. There’s no world. It’s looking past that to where people really are (perfect spirit) and there is a fundamental law of the mind that is taught in ACIM that if people understand it, they’d be pretty damn careful about the way they think about other people. The fundamental law is “as you see him, you will see yourself”. People don’t understand that what they are thinking about of other people (bodies) is setting up their own experience of themselves. If we are thinking negative thoughts and judging other people, it leads to depression, it leads to unhappiness, leads to a feeling of unworthiness and dissatisfaction, it leads to the feeling of scarcity because it fosters the idea of separation. But, as we said, there is only one real problem, the idea that we separated ourselves from God, which is why ACIM says “a sense of separation from God is the only lack you need corrected”. All the lack people see in their life and feel in their life is symbolic of the one real lack which is the idea of us believing we separated ourselves from God and that leads to lack. You can’t have scarcity in fullness. You can’t have any lack in oneness. You can’t have anything missing in wholeness by definition. It’s only when you have some kind of separation or division that you can even have the idea of scarcity.
In the story of the prodigal son, related to us by J in the bible 2000 years ago and in the Course, the son thinks it might be a good idea to leave his father’s house to see if he can do better on his own. Well, it turns out to be one big mistake for the son because all he finds is scarcity (well, he at least thought he was experiencing scarcity).
You can’t have scarcity in oneness and wholeness. You can’t have ideas like death, until you leave perfect oneness and have division because then you have duality, twoness, polarity, and opposites. Once you have more than one thing, you have a subject and an object. You have the whole false world that follows from that. You have an idea that leads to consciousness because in order to have consciousness, you have something else to be conscious of. Consciousness does not exist in Heaven. In Heaven, it’s more like an awareness which is why ACIM uses that word to describe Heaven. It says, “Heaven is an awareness of perfect oneness. There is nothing else to be conscious of, which leads to perfect safety. Everything is one, everything is eternal.” But, if you have division and you have opposites, then you have something else going on. That’s why it says, in the book of Genesis that “you shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. From the day you eat of it, you shall die.” Well, Good and Evil are opposites. Once you have opposites, then you have death because you have a seeming opposite to Heaven. Heaven only has eternal life. But, once you have division, then you have an opposite. You have death. If you return to wholeness, then there is no such thing as death. Death is actually overcome as a result. You know it’s a thought system that includes everything, covers everything, and it does not leave you with a bunch of unanswered questions. It really covers the whole thing. I don’t think there is anything in the world, including why people behave the way they do, why the world is so freakin crazy, why people are so driven, why you have all these addictions up to and including war. I think the Course explains everything and I think it explains the answer to it. It says there is only one problem and there is only one solution. The solution is to go home through forgiveness. It defines what forgiveness is…we are forgiving people not because they’ve really done something. ACIM says “forgiveness does not pardon sins and make them real. It sees that there was no sin and in that view all your sins are forgiven.” I might add that only in that view are all your sins forgiven. Because, remember, as you see him, you will see yourself. So that means that if they are guilty, you are guilty. If they had really done something, then you’ve done something to yourself. That’s the way it will be translated in your unconscious mind.
The unconscious mind knows the truth even if the conscious mind has been tricked by what we call the ego (or the world of multiplicity, as the Hindus call it). What the Buddhists call an illusion, the Course calls an illusion and further refines it to the idea of it being a dream. So, no matter what we see with the body’s eyes, no matter what we think we are seeing with the body’s eyes, we are really seeing with the mind, not with the body’s eyes. That means our own body is a projection that is coming from our mind.
When we exercise the type of forgiveness taught in ACIM, it undoes this idea of separation and it returns you to oneness. Also, it returns you to oneness and wholeness. There are very few things in the world that do that and what is passing for spirituality in most cases today is dealing with the effect instead of the cause. ACIM is the classic kind of spirituality that was used by Buddha and Jesus to undo the ego. ACIM says salvation is undoing. So every time you forgive, you undo the false you and return to the real you and the real you is perfect oneness with God.