In this video, we read and discussed “Christmas as the End of Sacrifice” (ACIM, T-15.XI.) This conversation was facilitated by Bruce Rawles as part of the School For A Course In Miracles (SFACIM) curriculum hosted by Lyn Corona and Tim Wise. In this conversation about A Course In Miracles, we started with this opening reading for meditation:
“Unfairness and attack are one mistake, so firmly joined that where one is perceived the other must be seen. You cannot be unfairly treated. The belief you are is but another form of the idea you are deprived by someone not yourself. Projection of the cause of sacrifice is at the root of everything perceived to be unfair and not your just deserts. Yet it is you who ask this of yourself, in deep injustice to the Son of God. You have no enemy except yourself, and you are enemy indeed to him because you do not know him as yourself. What could be more unjust than that he be deprived of what he is, denied the right to be himself, and asked to sacrifice his Father’s Love and yours as not his due?” (https://acim.org/acim/en/s/304#3:1-7 | T-26.X.3:1-7)
The ultimate sacrifice isn’t losing one’s physical body – but believing that we could be separate from Spirit … and each other. We reinforce that insane and needless belief further by insisting that we can divide, limit, and constrain our Infinite Spirit to finite bodies. We sacrifice our peace by consistently identifying with fantasy, form, and appearances (boldfacing added by me):
“These eyes, made not to see, will never see. For the idea they represent left not its maker, and it is their maker that sees through them.What was its maker’s goal but not to see? For this the body’s eyes are perfect means, but not for seeing. See how the body’s eyes rest on externals and cannot go beyond. Watch how they stop at nothingness, unable to go beyond the form to meaning. Nothing so blinding as perception of form. For sight of form means understanding has been obscured.” (ACIM, T-22.III.6:1-8)
Ego attempts – with incessant propaganda – to convince us we’re bodies at the mercy of the world, rather than minds that are projecting the world and can therefore afford to be consistently merciful – since in truth we are doing everything that seems to happen “to us” to ourselves:
“Let me perceive forgiveness as it is. Would I accuse myself of doing this? I will not lay this chain upon myself.” (ACIM, W-134.17:3-5)
Here are the first 3 paragraphs of the “Christmas as the End of Sacrifice” section in the text:
“Fear not to recognize the whole idea of sacrifice as solely of your making. And seek not safety by attempting to protect yourself from where it is not. Your brothers and your Father have become very fearful to you. And you would bargain with them for a few special relationships, in which you think you see some scraps of safety. Do not try longer to keep apart your thoughts and the Thought that has been given you. When they are brought together and perceived where they are, the choice between them is nothing more than a gentle awakening, and as simple as opening your eyes to daylight when you have no more need of sleep.
The sign of Christmas is a star, a light in darkness. See it not outside yourself, but shining in the Heaven within, and accept it as the sign the time of Christ has come. He comes demanding nothing. No sacrifice of any kind, of anyone, is asked by Him. In His Presence the whole idea of sacrifice loses all meaning. For He is Host to God. And you need but invite Him in Who is there already, by recognizing that His Host is One, and no thought alien to His Oneness can abide with Him there. Love must be total to give Him welcome, for the Presence of Holiness creates the holiness that surrounds it. No fear can touch the Host Who cradles God in the time of Christ, for the Host is as holy as the perfect Innocence which He protects, and Whose power protects Him.
This Christmas give the Holy Spirit everything that would hurt you. Let yourself be healed completely that you may join with Him in healing, and let us celebrate our release together by releasing everyone with us. ³Leave nothing behind, for release is total, and when you have accepted it with me you will give it with me. All pain and sacrifice and littleness will disappear in our relationship, which is as innocent as our relationship with our Father, and as powerful. Pain will be brought to us and disappear in our presence, and without pain there can be no sacrifice. ⁶And without sacrifice there love must be.”
To undo the guilt and restore our minds to peace, we must extend our definition of self from separate, finite, and exclusive, to completely joined, infinite, and inclusive. We need to include all the aspects of our real Self (the “others”) that are waiting patiently for re-integration in my split and misinterpreting mind. These limited and limiting divided and dividing self-concepts are what hurt us, at least within our tormenting dreams of individuality. A hint is that the word “individuality” contains the word “duality” – we harbor hurtful hate whenever we detour into divisive dualistic demonizing destructive dreams.
A quick rule of thumb to determine if we’re undermining our peaceful natural (but rarely “normal”) inheritance is to notice when we are engaging in – and justifying – a “we/they” or “us/them” paradigm, regardless of the criteria for distinction, differentiation and any form of making “big deals” out of differences. Ego – the belief in separation – can only seem to persist when we insist on making these negligible-in-eternity (but seemingly enormous-in-our-myopic zoomed-in-within-time) differences “important” and worthy of waging wars or at least a few dualistic “terrible two” tantrums.
Am I sacrificing my peace by indulging in “we/they” thinking?
“You who believe that sacrifice is love must learn that sacrifice is separation from love. For sacrifice brings guilt as surely as love brings peace. Guilt is the condition of sacrifice, as peace is the condition for the awareness of your relationship with God. Through guilt you exclude your Father and your brothers from yourself. Through peace you invite them back, realizing that they are where your invitation bids them be. What you exclude from yourself seems fearful, for you endow it with fear and try to cast it out, though it is part of you. Who can perceive part of himself as loathsome, and live within himself in peace? And who can try to resolve the “conflict” of Heaven and hell in him by casting Heaven out and giving it the attributes of hell, without experiencing himself as incomplete and lonely?” (ACIM, T-15.XI.4:1-8)
As Ken Wapnick points out “special love is always sacrifice” since limiting our experience to the fragmented distorted misperceptions and misinterpretations of our egos necessarily constrains our awareness to a dismembered (dead) “infinitesimal crumb” instead of the “infinite cake” of our eternal, All-Inclusive Identity which leaves no one out.
As a popular phrase and book title suggests: “Don’t sweat the small stuff. … and it’s all small stuff.”
(True eternal) Love and sacrifice are mutually exclusive.
Here is a vital related quote about our (ego) addiction to sacrifice, victimhood, martyrdom and just plain believing that we’re unfairly treated at every turn:
“Beware of the temptation to perceive yourself unfairly treated.” (https://acim.org/acim/en/s/304#4:1 | T-26.X.4:1)
“What matters is what happens in the mind.” – Abe Ramirez
“Sacrifice is so essential to your thought system that salvation apart from sacrifice means nothing to you. Your confusion of sacrifice and love is so profound that you cannot conceive of love without sacrifice. And it is this that you must look upon; sacrifice is attack, not love. If you would accept but this one idea, your fear of love would vanish.” (ACIM, T-15.X.5:7-10)
“This Holy Instant (and from now on) I give Jesus (or any ego-free symbol) – our infinitely benevolent TSA agent – everything that would hurt my mind.”
“This course does not attempt to take from you the little that you have. It does not try to substitute utopian ideas for satisfactions which the world contains. There are no satisfactions in the world.” (ACIM, W-133.2:3-5)
“How else can you find joy in a joyless place except by realizing that you are not there? You cannot be anywhere God did not put you, and God created you as part of Him. That is both where you are and what you are. It is completely unalterable. It is total inclusion. You cannot change it now or ever. It is forever true. It is not a belief, but a Fact. Anything that God created is as true as He is. Its truth lies only in its perfect inclusion in Him Who alone is perfect. To deny this is to deny yourself and Him, since it is impossible to accept one without the other.” (ACIM, T-6.II.6:1-11)
(This conversation was facilitated by Bruce Rawles as part of the School For A Course In Miracles (SFACIM) curriculum hosted by Lyn Corona and Tim Wise. This YouTube video recording was made on October 13, 2024.)
Read some prior posts on ACIMblog.com that refer to sacrifice in ACIM… and some previous posts about Christmas.
