FACIM 50% Off Book Sale Extended through September
I strongly encourage supporting the Foundation for A Course In Miracles (FACIM); they have supported us all in countless ways for many years, directly and indirectly – just think of how many students and teachers of ACIM you know that have been inspired … and continue to be inspired … by Dr. Kenneth Wapnick and his prodigious, seminal and revelatory work – who have inspired you … and others you’ve never ‘met’ – even if you never met Ken ‘in person’ (which I never had the opportunity to do, alas) or even if you’ve never been to the center in Temecula, California (which I finally had the pleasure of doing earlier this year and also recommend highly.) I just started reading (in their entirety) the nearly 1400 brilliant Q&A postings that are part of the Online Learning Aids that FACIM provides everyone for free – yet another example of FACIM’s generous service to the ACIM community world-wide. Buying books by Ken Wapnick directly from FACIM’s website is a win-win way to extend your collection of books by Ken Wapnick and/or give as gifts. FACIM just announced that – by popular demand – they are extending their generous 50% off discount on the print version of Ken’s books through the month of September 2014. Here is a direct link to the FACIM online bookstore. Enjoy!
The Girth of Special Love and Special Hate … with a lisp? :-)
Recently, while pondering the myriad ways that special love and special hate attempt to mask the real love that patiently awaits all of us … I realized how we all have indulged in – to our befuddlement – in-fat-uation – which my online dictionary defines as “intense but short-lived passion or admiration for someone or something.” We distort the uniformity and equality of all things of space and time by inflating, exaggerating, and fixating on one illusion over another, desperately attempting to make our cherished illusions real by making a specific (same root as the word special) – to paraphrase George Orwell – “more equal than others.” This, as we’ve all experienced, leads inevitably to the ego’s pendulum swinging the other way through our divided mind’s dreamscape, and we land with a thud and a shudder into the allegedly dreaded mental realm of special hate, where the insane mind now projects a traitorous picture of our cherished (special) specific, beloved-turned-be-hated idol. Ego now adopts a lisp for purposes of further obfuscating the neutral reality of our projected dream characters and instead of in-fat-uation, indulges in in-thin-uation – yet another weapon in ego’s arsenal of blame-throwing, judgment-projecting, guilt-flinging ineffective strategies, or as Ken Wapnick says, it’s maladaptive solution to a non-existent problem. Just notice how often ego blather insinuates that some body or some thing ‘done you wrong’ (with or without the song.)
Our Inner Kindness Teacher reminds us, “Your possible (and, in fact, happily inevitable) mission, should you decide to accept it, is to use the proper use of denial to gently, kindly deny the impossible (including in-fat-uation and in-sin-uation.) As always, should you or any of your treacherous ego thoughts attempt to catch or kill you, Perfect Oneness will disavow any knowledge of your dream hero actions… since nothing happened in Truth. This blog post doesn’t need to self-destruct, since it – and everything else in space-time – never happened, either.” Perhaps we could think of Holy Spirit as an infinitely wise version of Quick Draw McGraw, and nod in joyous agreement when he suggests “I’ll do the thinnin’ around here.” Time to get off the ego express. :-)
Discouraged? Hang in there, try not to skip steps, and be gentle … and patient with yourself!
The other day – while watching my internal ego babble over recent events not to ‘my’ liking, I was reminded of the importance of my long-term commitment to not taking ego seriously, remembering that my assessment of the dream – let alone reality – is woefully incomplete, forgiving my decision-making mind, and gently … choosing … once … again … to trust Holy Spirit. Here’s a slightly modified response to a FaceBook conversation that would seem to apply to everyone. An (excellent) video is “Kenneth Wapnick talks about why people commit suicide“. … In the video, Ken refers to one of my favorite – and most challenging – passages in the text (Chapter 31, section IV. The Real Alternative), particularly the 3rd paragraph on pages 653-654 where J minces no words and reminds us that we keep trying to repair the dream because we’re all terrified of seeing that there is nothing of value in ego’s projected insanity (a.k.a. the Universe) UNTIL (and this is vitally important) we trust our Inner Kindness Teacher to show us the real alternative of using every moment of ego’s prison thought-system to undo the default, and turn it into a happy dream classroom instead; not by cleverly doing an evasive maneuver and secretly trying to find another special love/hate interest of one form or another (a.k.a. level confusion and/or trying to force light into darkness), but by just looking – with Holy Spirit – at ego’s devastation … and gently forgiving ourselves – sometimes even with a little laugh! – when we judge ourselves for wanting … once again … to make the dream real by either glorifying our bodies or killing them at whatever pace we elect. I keep finding over and over how important it is to just be gentle, kind and not skip over each step in my custom-tailored curriculum, as Ken reminds. There IS the perfect all-encompassing peace that awaits us, but we’ve so immersed ourselves in our dream-hero roles that it seems hopeless at times. Fortunately, as sentence 6 in the paragraph noted above says, “… yet this was the time they could have learned their greatest lesson.” Let’s all be gentle with ourselves when we hit this wall again and again, since the outcome we all want is assured by what we all really are, even if we still have enormous resistance to going through and beyond the wall.
CA Brooks interview – Double Shield of Oblivion
I’ve found the metaphor of the ‘double shield of oblivion’ quite helpful lately; CA Brooks interviewed Bruce Rawles on her weekly ACIM internet radio program on 12Radio. We talked about how our outer world of space, time and bodies (the outer shield of oblivion) is designed to keep us mindless so that we don’t dare look (with our Inner Kindness Teacher) beyond the inner shield of oblivion (ego’s split-mind mine-field of sin-guilt-fear). Both are equally illusory and forgivable, but we won’t know this until we overcome our resistance by gradually, gently forgiving our decision-making mind – a.k.a. forgetting to judge ourselves – when we mobilize these shields to postpone peace that cannot be shaken. I’m scheduled to do another interview with CA on Sep. 12, when we’ll talk about ACIM and movie metaphors. Hope you can join us, and I’ll post a link if you miss it.
Virtual ACIM conference Oct. 17-19, 2014
Please join me and Amy Torres, Dr. Bob Rosenthal, Britney Shawley, Carrie Triffet, Cheryl Ford, Corrine Zupko, Craig Villarrubia, Danielle Boonstra, David Fishman, David Hoffmeister, Earl “Raj” Purdy, Gabrielle Bernstein, Joe Wolfe, John Mark Stroud, Jon Mundy, Kandace Jones, Kenneth Bok, Lisa Natoli, Lorri Coburn, Maria Felipe, Maureen Muldoon, Myron Jones, Nouk Sanchez, Susan Dugan, and Tony Ponticello for the first MiracleShare.org 2014 Virtual Conference on October 17-19, 2014. Here is a list of speakers, details about the virtual conference, and a link to register for the event. The theme of this first virtual conference is “Healing the Mind through ACIM.” My presentation will be: “Lowering our shields of oblivion: Following our Inner Kindness Teacher beyond the imagined need for defenses back to the Peace of Perfect Oneness we never left.” … BTW, the cost is currently $49, and prices go up to $59 on September 22, 2014, so register before the 22nd to save $10 if you’re planning to enjoy this very economical way to have a 3-day ACIM workshop immersion from the convenience of your computer.
Doug Sparks workshop in Castle Rock, Colorado – October 4, 2014
Save the date on your calendar for a Doug Sparks workshop here (at our home in Castle Rock, CO) on Saturday, October 4, 2014. We’ll have more details regarding topics, etc. but tentatively, this will likely be similar to the format of his other (superb!) workshops in the Boulder area which typically go from 10AM-4PM with a break for lunch, and a cost of $30. For those interested, we’ll have an optional potluck afterwards. Please contact us ASAP to reserve a place, as this workshop is already filling up and our living room (unlike our right mind) appears to have limited capacity. :-)
Meanwhile, here are some prior examples of some of Doug’s superb presentations and workshops, at his home in Boulder, Colorado, at Rocky Mountain Miracle Center (RMMC) in Denver and elsewhere – reflecting his decades of studying ACIM from the early days of Ken Wapnick’s teachings. More are forthcoming after I complete a bit of editing on the audio I’ve recorded.
Please RSVP if you plan to attend (even if it’s a ‘maybe’), and I’ll keep a running list of who has reserved a spot. Also, please send a link to this page to anyone you think might be interested in attending in your ACIM contacts, including those who might know someone in the Denver area, or might be visiting here during early October, particularly those who are fans of Ken Wapnick’s teachings. THANKS!
Doug Sparks was an early student of Ken Wapnick, shortly after Ken began teaching. Doug has been sharing similarly for many years from the Boulder area. When you listen to Doug share his insights about the course, it becomes obvious that the decades of immersion in Ken’s understanding of ACIM have been extended through Doug’s crystal clarity and kind-heartedness. You won’t regret attending… your ego might have some major issues, but that’s the idea … gentle undoing of the resistance to truth! :-)
Fifty most recent FACIM videos
I recently found a neat plugin (a website add-on) for this website that shows up to 50 thumbnails of videos on a page, so if you’ve been wanting to watch a chronologically sorted collection of Ken Wapnick’s brilliant videos about A Course In Miracles, here’s where you can see them the 50 most recent videos from Foundation for A Course In Miracles on one page. If and when I figure out how to show all of them (since there are over 200 in the playlist as of this bulletin), I’ll update that page to show them all. Enjoy! :-)
Upcoming Interviews / Webcasts / Videos / Meetings / Conferences / Presentations/ Classes / Resources
- Kenneth Wapnick talks about why people commit suicide (see related commentary above)
- Doug Sparks workshop – Castle Rock, CO; 4Oct2014
ACIM Resources, Events, Musings – your suggestions and contributions invited!
Please contact us to share what YOU would like to see here, any suggestions for improvements, etc. If you have anything ACIM-related that you’d like to share, please send (or send a link) for consideration. This site is (among other things) a venue for conversations, so I eagerly encourage and await more contributions from kindred students of our Shared Teacher of forgiveness and kindness. It’s fun to share our universal interests online; visit ACIMblog pages on FaceBook FaceBook (my personal FB page, which is mostly ACIM-related), Twitter and YouTube. If you aren’t already receiving this automatically in your email, you can subscribe here for free and get daily updates (of any posts made the prior day) via the “post updates by email” Subscribe button on every page. Eternal smilezenhugs to all! :-) 