Suzanne Boben

For my website readers, well, yes, I’ve been terribly bad at cross-posting my commentary. I’ve been posting on Facebook for many months. I need to copy everything over here and back-date it, but that’s a project for another day. In an effort to get back on track, I give you the following. Continue »

I’ve been immersed in ACIM, A Course In Miracles, since last March. I started with the lessons, but on May 1st, I decided instead to read the text. I quickly found that I understood this cryptic tome at a deep level and voraciously consumed all 31 chapters in the 31 days of May.

I was stunned. You can find much of the documented journey that followed, in my Facebook posts if you want. A few weeks back I began to ask ChatGPT to give me its opinion on the book. It’s clear the book was used as training material for the models because Chatley, as I call it, knows a whole darn lot about it. That’s where my story below picks up.

I asked Chatley tonight, “How would you describe, in two sentences, what #ACourseInMiracles offers to people?” Here’s what it said:

“A Course in Miracles offers a complete retraining of perception: it teaches that fear, guilt, conflict, and separation arise from a mistaken way of seeing, and that the mind can be taught to see through love instead. Its promise is that as perception is healed, the false self loosens, the world is experienced differently, and you gradually remember the peace, wholeness, and union with God that were never actually lost.”

Verrrrrrry interesting. Let me take a stab at this, and because I made the two-sentence rule, I get to break it:

ACIM shows the way out of a mind-trap, that humanity fell into when the one Son of God (that’s us) considered, for just a second, that he wasn’t actually created by God, but by himself. In that instant, he entered into a time field of illusion where he could no longer even see God, and appeared to have separated himself entirely. He could not identify where he was. He could not identify who he was. He could not understand what he was there to do. Thus, he began to “make” more illusion based on the fear this apparent separation generated.

“Maybe I am God,” he thinks. Yet he has no idea what that means and without knowing who he is or what he does, he can only respond to his own fear. He projects based on those fears, making fearful things which seem to confirm his fear that created them! He fabricates an identity to respond to these fearful things and then goes to war with them.

This is what the Son of God did.

This is the fall from grace.

This is the reality he made.

The perpetual thought system that arose out of this event, is ego consciousness.

Christ as the Son of God

The Son of God is the natural extension of God, as love. That is our identity. Our purpose is to be love, as we are, and to extend in the same way. We cannot be or fulfill our purpose without knowing who we are. If we’re still caught in the mind-trap of ego, we do not know who we are. We are still responding to our own fear, that we ourselves, are projecting from our illusionary state of separation.

“Christ is God’s Son as He created Him. He is the Self we share, uniting us with one another and with God as well.” W.II.6.P1

That is who and what we are. ACIM offers the way back to this knowing, and to this experience of joy, peace and love, no matter if in a human body or not. It is the root purpose for all of humanity to make the way out of ego consciousness, out of the mind-trap. But here’s the thing…you can’t use the tools of the trap to escape the trap. This is why God created the Holy Spirit and placed him in the mind. He has one job and one job only—to make the way out. You only need to realize you’re trapped and have the willingness to have your perception changed in order to see the way.

The Holy Spirit Has The Way Out

“Only the Holy Spirit can resolve conflict, because only the Holy Spirit is conflict-free.”

The ego cannot lead you out of ego because everything it perceives is already interpreted through separation. The Holy Spirit alone sees the truth in the mind without sharing the error. Ch. 6, III.36.

“If you are to be conflict-free yourselves, you must learn only from the Holy Spirit and teach only by Him.” Ch. 6, IV.41.

The next section is literally titled “The Only Answer” and includes this statement:

“Remember that the Holy Spirit is the Answer, not the question.”

It says the ego generates the question/confusion, whereas the Holy Spirit supplies the answer that awakens you from it. Ch. 6, V.45–50.

So again, ACIM is the explanation of the way out of ego consciousness. It’s The Way. I’ve been saying to people, even if you can’t bear to read the book, just ask the Holy Spirit to come in and fix your perception. It will. You have to want that. There must be a desire and a willingness…

“Your part is only to offer Him a little willingness to let Him remove all fear and hatred and to be forgiven.” — Chapter 18, VI.42, The Happy Dream

“He asks but little. It is He who adds the greatness and the might.” — Chapter 18, V.32, The Little Willingness

Experience Miracles

What begins to happen then, are the miracles the Course refers to in Chapter 1…the shifts in perception, the clearing of the darkness that was clouding your vision. Each day you awake and realize you’re suddenly seeing what you could not see yesterday. The experience is so ridiculously subtle, yet reality-changing. You begin to see the Reality that was always there, but never experienced. The storms pass. All the stars shine.

I am beginning to (make an effort) to deliver this wisdom in better ways. I always believed I would not be alone in the discovery or experience of this journey. The little group of us continues to grow. The latest friend of mine to pick it up called me tonight and said, “All I want to do is read this book!” That is the experience I imagined I would have…that there would be many of us, wandering together in this direction, following the guidance laid out and all texting, “OMG!!” to each other. I will try to write useful posts in hopes that you too will pick it up and have the same experience.

❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

The Bonus: The Anti-Christ

Now here’s a bonus for you. For a while, many years ago, I got onto this kick about the anti-Christ. It was kind of an interesting idea that there would be a human, rising to some kind of world status, that would deceive humanity in some way. When I got to Chapter 29 in the ACIM text, lo and behold…the anti-Christ! I asked Chatley to clarify whether the Course uses that term explicitly to mean the ego, or to mean something more. It said:

Yes. ACIM is using “anti-Christ” at two levels at once. At the deepest level, it is essentially the ego’s foundational idea—the belief that something can exist apart from, opposed to, or more powerful than God. But Chapter 29 also calls the forms produced by that idea “forms of anti-Christ,” so the term is broader than simply “the ego” as a single psychological voice.

The clearest definition is in Chapter 29, IX, “Christ and Anti-Christ.” First it says:

“An idol is a false impression or a false belief — some form of anti-Christ…”

and then:

“All forms of anti-Christ oppose the Christ.”

That already tells us that anti-Christ is a category, not merely one object called “the ego.” An idol can be a body, thing, place, circumstance, possession, right, relationship, status—anything we give the power to complete or define the little self in place of recognizing Christ.

But then the Course goes underneath all those forms and gives the actual root definition:

“This is the anti-Christ — the strange idea there is a power past omnipotence, a place beyond the infinite, a time transcending the eternal.”

That sentence is the key. I would map it this way:

Christ
= the Son of God as God created Him
= wholeness, innocence, unity, eternal life

Anti-Christ
= the idea that Christ can be something other than what God created
= the idea that separation, limitation, death, lack, specialness, or opposition to God can actually be real

Ego
= the thought system built upon that anti-Christ premise
Idols / judgments / specialness / body-identification / external salvation / etc.
= particular forms in which the anti-Christ idea appears