Chapter Six of A Course in Miracles says, “Future loss is not your fear. But present joining is your dread.” To maintain our separate, ego identification, we need to believe that our peace is subject to what goes on in the world. This means that the thought of future loss (of our health, a loved one, a job, money) isn’t the source of fear, though it appears to be. Instead, our real fear, our dread, is of joining with the Holy Spirit’s peace in our mind, undoing our identification with the ego and the ‘I’ we hold dear, the one riddled with shame and guilt, the one that feels condemned, always anticipating disaster. This is why the Course also says that we are not really afraid of crucifixion, but of redemption:
“You think you have made a world God would destroy; and by loving Him, which you do, you would throw this world away, which you would. Therefore, you have used the world to cover your love, and the deeper you go into the blackness of the ego’s foundation, the closer you come to the Love that is hidden there. And it is this that frightens you.” (T-13.III.4:3-5).
To be redeemed, according to A Course in Miracles, is to leave the depressing, self-defeating thought system of the ego behind and claim our inheritance as a part of God’s one Self. In other words, it is to realise our essential union with others, expressed in acknowledging our shared need. Yet we are afraid of redemption because we think it means the end of ‘us’.
Following in the Course’s tradition of using metaphors to convey major themes, this podcast includes a reading of ‘Through the Looking Glass: Forgiveness, Time, and the Event Horizon,’ which uses a scientific metaphor for transformation and discusses how to approach the prospect of redemption without fear. The essay is taken from Alchemists of Suburbia: A Course in Miracles, Psychology and the Art of Integration.
Reflections on A Course in Miracles 