Correction is Always Internal

. . . on making contact with our innocence and perfection

Correction is always internal. The external will confirm the change - or indicate the need for change - but it can never be a source of correction in itself.

Say that you are in a relationship that is not healthy for you. The traditional view of being human would say, leave the relationship. But the ACIM view invites you to look within. Why are you in this relationship? What need is being met? What need is not being met?

These questions are a form of spiritual psychotherapy. You ask the questions of the Holy Spirit and Jesus and then wait on the answers. You open up a dialogue with the divine. If you have known a good therapist in your life, how much better do you imagine the Holy Spirit is?

So ask: what is the ego's rationale for your pain? On the one hand it doesn't matter at all but on the other, until you see how little ego cares about happiness and wellness, it can be hard to understand the need for truly seeking and accepting an alternative.

The truth is, you can ditch the relationship or not ditch it, but if you don't go into the interior rationale for the relationship, then it will just come back - in a different form maybe, a different person, a little better or a little worse, but the same dynamic will play out. And it is the dynmaic that needs to be addressed.

Those patterns of repetition - and the belief that we can refine them and that it's up to us to do so - is the separation. A Course in Miracles is just one way of breaking the patterns up in order to gain a meta-view from which we can initiate a substantive realignment - attention given only to the Holy Spirit, Love the only goal, reversal of cause and effect, et cetera.

This is another re-patterning, yes, but one that is designed to release us from patterns forever - not by force or effort but by gentle transcendence, sort of the way dawn undoes the darkness.

So if you go into the ego's rationale for pain-in-relationship - if you find out what need is being met and what need is not being met - then you will learn something important. You will learn that you cannot be affected by the external because the external is merely the outside picture of an inside condition (T-21.in.1:5).

You will know this not only as a cool ACIM quote. You will know it as you know how to draw a next breath.

Again, you may ditch the relationship and you may not, but it doesn't matter because the relationship was never the problem. It merely reflects the degree to which you have accepted God's love for you, which is to accept God's view of you as wholly perfect and innocent, and that is an interior experience.

This is why we say that all correction is internal. If you look in the mirror and your hat is on backwards you don't demand the reflection take corrective action. If there is grief and pain in your life and community and world, the problem is not outside! The problem is within and - like putting a hat on right - it is eminently fixable.

Why do we resist this simple truth? There is so much healing in it!

Well, on the one hand, we don't accept it because ego's gotta ego, and it plays for keeps. It's difficult and scary to go deeply into egoic thinking with a goal of undoing it. I hear that; I share that with you. Undoing ego is no joke.

But on the other hand, this question of resistance is misplaced. It implies we have to do or not do something in order to remember and know God's love.

We do not. That is what all this inquiry and spiritual psychotherapy eventually teaches us: we don't have to do anything. It’s all already done.

And honestly, that is the real crux: that is the last bastion of specialness - that it is up to me to remember God and restore God's Light and Love unto the world. Put me on the mount to sermonize! Put me in a crypt to raise the dead! Put me on the cross to redeem my brothers and sisters!

Sigh.

Here is my truth: the remembrance of God's love happens when it happens. We have nothing to do with it! In the remembrance, the notion that we are agents with powers of choice and decision dissolves. The notion that Creation is composed of separate parts which can come and go dissolves.

For me, this remembrance and its effects happen not as a lightning bolt but as a series of steps, each making possible the next (to paraphrase Adrienne Rich). Time matters less; the ego's view of me matters less; external crises (which are legion) matter less.

That is why "dream" is such a helpful metaphor. What goes sideways in the dream has no effect on the real world, and fixing or not fixing it also has no effect. And when we wake up, the dream disappears. We don't even need to remember it. Having never actually existed, it has no effects.

That is what we are doing, you and I. We are waking up together. We are leaving a bad dream together.

I would like to add one other point.

Some relationships are made to be left. Please do not stay in relationships that cause you or others pain. But do seek and nurture those relationships in which your inquiry into truth and reality is supported. Do seek dialogues which deepen your understanding and bolster your courage. Do offer and accept gestures of mercy, kindness and assistance.

In your heart, you know love, and beyond your heart - in Mind at its most Cosmic - you know God's Love. You maybe have forgotten and you may even be in a state of active denial but still.

God's Love is given and you are its recipient.

I do not know when you will consent to remember this truth, but I do know with absolute certainty that you will. Why? Because you teach me over and over and over that I am a Child of God and a Child of Peace, created to create like my Father in Heaven. Trust me: you know.

I mean this in the most literal way possible: your presence in my life - as a fellow traveler, a fellow student, a friend - as a brother or a sister - is holy and I am guided by its holiness accordingly.

I love you and I am grateful for you, truly.

Sean