Jackie Lora Jones and Bruce Rawles continue their conversations about A Course In Miracles (ACIM) in this video about Becoming a Lucid Dreamer (instead of a figure in the dream) by reading portions of Light in the Dream (ACIM, T-18.III) and sharing comments about the prominent metaphor of dreaming in ACIM. When we slowly-but-surely shift (with help from our Inner Kindness Teacher) from identifying as the mindless “Hero of the Dream” to the lucid “Dreamer of the Dream” we become free of ego tyranny because we learn not to take nightmares seriously, ultimately including everyone Here are some of the topics we covered with extended quotes in places:
“Trust not your good intentions.²They are not enough.³But trust implicitly your willingness, whatever else may enter.⁴Concentrate only on this, and be not disturbed that shadows surround it.⁵That is why you came.⁶If you could come without them you would not need the holy instant.⁷Come to it not in arrogance, assuming that you must achieve the state its coming brings with it.⁸The miracle of the holy instant lies in your willingness to let it be what it is.⁹And in your willingness for this lies also your acceptance of yourself as you were meant to be.” (ACIM, T-18.IV.2:1-9)
“There is but one interpretation of motivation that makes any sense.²And because it is the Holy Spirit’s judgment it requires no effort at all on your part.³Every loving thought is true.⁴Everything else is an appeal for healing and help, regardless of the form it takes.⁵Can anyone be justified in responding with anger to a brother’s plea for help?” (ACIM, T-12.I.3:1-5)
“Love makes no comparisons.” (ACIM, W-195.4:2)
“You live by symbols. ²You have made up names for everything you see. ³Each one becomes a separate entity, identified by its own name. ⁴By this you carve it out of unity. ⁵By this you designate its special attributes, and set it off from other things by emphasizing space surrounding it.” (ACIM, W-184.1:1-5)
“Appeal everything you believe gladly to God’s Own Higher Court, because it speaks for Him and therefore speaks truly. ⁵It will dismiss the case against you, however carefully you have built it up. ⁶The case may be fool-proof, but it is not God-proof. ⁷The Holy Spirit will not hear it, because He can only witness truly. ⁸His verdict will always be ‘thine is the Kingdom,’ because He was given to you to remind you of what you are.” (ACIM, T-5.VI.10:4-8)
“The curriculum is highly individualized, and all aspects are under the Holy Spirit’s particular care and guidance. ⁷Ask and He will answer. ⁸The responsibility is His, and He alone is fit to assume it. ⁹To do so is His function. ¹⁰To refer the questions to Him is yours. ¹¹Would you want to be responsible for decisions about which you understand so little? ¹²Be glad you have a Teacher Who cannot make a mistake. ¹³His answers are always right. ¹⁴Would you say that of yours?” (ACIM, M-29.2:6-14)
“Do not fight yourself.” (ACIM, T-30.I.1:7)
“No one can escape from illusions unless he looks at them, for not looking is the way they are protected. ²There is no need to shrink from illusions, for they cannot be dangerous. ³We are ready to look more closely at the ego’s thought system because together we have the lamp that will dispel it, and since you realize you do not want it, you must be ready. ⁴Let us be very calm in doing this, for we are merely looking honestly for truth.” (ACIM, T-11.V.1:1-4)
“I am never upset for the reason I think.” (ACIM, W-5)
“I could see peace instead of this.” (ACIM, W-34)
“Take this from me and look upon it, judging it for me. ⁹Let me not see it as a sign of sin and death, nor use it for destruction. ¹⁰Teach me how not to make of it an obstacle to peace, but let You use it for me, to facilitate its coming.” (ACIM, T-19.IV-C.11:8-10)
“… your understanding is not necessary.” (ACIM, T-18.III.4:11)
“A tranquil mind is not a little gift.” (ACIM, M-20.4:8)
“You and your brother are coming home together, after a long and meaningless journey that you undertook apart, and that led nowhere.” (ACIM, T-18.III.8:5)
and a quote related to the prior one above:
“We’re all just walking each other home.” – Ram Dass
To wake up from the dream, we need to accept Holy Spirit’s ever-present help more and more consistently. As we do so, we gradually replace the ego’s mindless insanity – of making big deals (it’s tantrum yoga) out of inconsequential trivia from the perspective of eternity – with Holy Spirit’s peaceful sanity remembering that nothing (real) has happened. We do, however, need to bring each specific to be undone through our forgiveness of ourselves for what hasn’t changed in Truth.
We don’t have any light as a separate self, but the All-Inclusive Identity we ALL share (a.k.a. Holy Spirit) IS where the light is that always dis-spells the darkness of making our projected differences important through the mechanisms of belief in separation (e.g. sin, guilt, fear, special hate, and special love, all of which collapse like a house of cards when we look at them with Holy Spirit.
Here are the first three paragraphs of “Light in the Dream” (ACIM, T-18.III):
“1. You who have spent your life in bringing truth to illusion, reality to fantasy, have walked the way of dreams. ²For you have gone from waking to sleeping, and on and on to a yet deeper sleep. ³Each dream has led to other dreams, and every fantasy that seemed to bring a light into the darkness but made the darkness deeper. ⁴Your goal was darkness, in which no ray of light could enter. ⁵And you sought a blackness so complete that you could hide from truth forever, in complete insanity. ⁶What you forgot was simply that God cannot destroy Himself. ⁷The light is in you. ⁸Darkness can cover it, but cannot put it out.
2. As the light comes nearer you will rush to darkness, shrinking from the truth, sometimes retreating to the lesser forms of fear, and sometimes to stark terror.²But you will advance, because your goal is the advance from fear to truth.³The goal you accepted is the goal of knowledge, for which you signified your willingness.⁴Fear seems to live in darkness, and when you are afraid you have stepped back.⁵Let us then join quickly in an instant of light, and it will be enough to remind you that your goal is light.
3. Truth has rushed to meet you since you called upon it.²If you knew Who walks beside you on the way that you have chosen, fear would be impossible.³You do not know because the journey into darkness has been long and cruel, and you have gone deep into it.⁴A little flicker of your eyelids, closed so long, has not yet been sufficient to give you confidence in yourself, so long despised.⁵You go toward love still hating it, and terribly afraid of its judgment upon you.⁶And you do not realize that you are not afraid of love, but only of what you have made of it.⁷You are advancing to love’s meaning, and away from all illusions in which you have surrounded it.⁸When you retreat to the illusion your fear increases, for there is little doubt that what you think it means is fearful.⁹Yet what is that to us who travel surely and very swiftly away from fear?”
… and a favorite line from that section that I always find inspiring: “You and your brother are coming home together, after a long and meaningless journey that you undertook apart, and that led nowhere.” (ACIM, T-18.III.8:5) It reminds me of a quote from Ram Dass: “We’re all just walking each other home.” I picture 8 billion+ of us on a gigantic sound stage in our dream (human) costumes taking a final curtain call at the end (top of the ladder) of a staggeringly realistic 3D dream production of a holographic movie we call Space, Hubris, Individuality and Time.
As Jackie pointed out toward the end of our conversation – as does Ken Wapnick frequently, for those who listen to his recordings, a very important distinction is that our problem isn’t the ego, since we made it up! The problem is that we believe in it! We took this fraudulent separate identity (a.k.a. ego) seriously and continue to do so whenever we project our unconscious unfounded guilt onto what appears to be a world outside of our mind, but the solution isn’t battling ego; it’s shifting our focus to the decision-making faculty of our mind where we can switch our identity from the insane dream figure representing separation to the lucid dreamer who realizes the separation never happened!
This video recording was recorded on Wednesday, June 5, 2023.
I enjoyed the Miracle Voices interview of Jackie Lora Jones by Tam Morgan and Matt McCabe: “Episode 91 – Miracle-Readiness and Forgiveness Flow” … You might, too! We were consecutive guests on. this excellent series; I detailed my Miracle Voices interview titled “Ahas! … It Just Doesn’t Matter” here. For fun, here is John Denver’s classic song “Saturday Night in Toledo, Ohio” that we talked about; the hometown of Jackie and her sister, Cindy Lora-Renard and they heard him perform the song there!
We also talked about some “Course Karaoke” ideas and using everything as a mnemonic device or symbol for mindfully looking at our thoughts, especially condemning judgments with our Inner Kindness Teacher, who dismisses them uniformly as forgivable. One example (of using revised lyrics to popular songs) is using these lyrics to the refrain in Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” … “Fear binds the world. Forgiveness sets it free.” 
Check out Jackie’s True Forgiveness Teachings podcast here. These readings provide a platform to discuss a variety of helpful ideas and practices from the non-dual metaphysics of A Course in Miracles. Jackie has conducted insightful video interviews with Gary Renard and numerous others. She and her sister, Cindy Lora-Renard, facilitate classes on ACIM in addition to equally highly-regarded workshops on “The Course.” Jackie’s first book, All Peace, No Pieces – now available in audiobook form – is a valuable addition to any Course student’s library, regardless of their level of familiarity with the Course’s ideas, with some particularly fun and insightful metaphors from the Wizard of Oz movie. Here are more ACIM-related conversations with Jackie Lora Jones and Bruce Rawles.