Thus in this world, the world of the ego, we cannot understand this, for if I give you a chocolate bar, you have it and I don’t. The content of the gift (which is what the Course always looks at) is guilt however, for the ego is always bargaining. We give a chocolate bar with a smile, but secretly we enter a debit entry into the accounts between us, and you owe me one now. Just wait till I give you two chocolate bars… This is the purpose of this world of specifics, and this is why the Course says: The world was made as an attack on God. (ACIM:W-pII.3.2:1) For the world of specifics seeks to defy the law of the spirit, and sin, guilt, and fear shatter the peace of Heaven. But in the world of spirit, the concept of a gift is reciprocal, because it is all about the content (of love) and not about form, and a thought is strengthened by sharing it.

This reciprocity of giving and receiving in the world of spirit is the central them of Logion 88. In my book I drew attention to an important passage in the workbook, which clarifies this in speaking about the difference between the messengers of the world (the mail man, UPS etc.), and the messengers of Heaven:

Thus in the world of spirit and of the miracle, there is total reciprocity, for love flows through, it expands as it is shared. Every unforgiveness is a block to that flow, every miracle is spiritual Drano, which opens the channel. And the experience is one of choosing love, and simply experiencing that you yourself experience love whenever you for-give. So the experience is one of flow, that’s why people so often feel that all I had to do was get out of the way, so that you can truly give, and therefore receive, for this experience of being in the flow, is a gift to yourself.

With the above in mind, read Logion 85, and appreciate what Jesus is telling us there:

Who then, is Adam in our story? The primordial man in the Biblical context, and therefore the archetypical first actor on the stage of the theater of time and space. In the context of the metaphysical creation sequence as per the account in A Course in Miracles, the four steps in which “the impossible” happened are:

1. The “tiny, mad idea” of the separation, i.e. the very notion that it would be possible to exist separate from our Source in God
2. The repression of the memory of Heaven, or the Holy Spirit,
   
3. The affirmation of the ego as a separate identity, which makes the separation from God real, but is bothered by guilt feelings over spoiling the peace of Heaven, which in turn is “solved” by the next step, projecting a world of the body and time and space, in which we can exist mindlessly, not bothered by our bad memories.
4. The Big Bang in this view then is the projection on the physical level of the separation thought in the mind, so that the body, living out its “story” in this world of time and space, is the embodiment of the thought of individuality. The archetype of this step is Adam.

The important thing in this process of the making of the world of time and space, is that steps 1-3 are all abstract, and occur in the mind, and that with step number 4 we accomplish the apparently complete identification with the individual existence of the false self or “ego” which now sees itself as one among a gazillion others, who completely forgot that he came from the mind which thought all of this up, which is therefore infinitely powerful, while within our limited awareness as individuals we have only very limited talents with which we try to survive in this world for a while.

Seen in this context, this saying states that we are immortal spirit in truth, and in fact, had Adam remembered who he was (as immortal spirit), he would have remembered his reality in Heaven as spirit, and thus known that he was immortal spirit also, being the Son of God. As such the statement is a reminder that we shortchange ourselves, and cheat ourselves of the reality we truly are by identifying as sons of Adam instead of Sons of God, or more precisely the Son of God. So our only mistake lies in our identifying ourselves with our role on the stage, instead of with the mind who we really are. So we’ve become actors on the stage of our own dream, and forgot we’re dreaming the dream, and we completely identify with the panic and excitement of the actor in the story, forgetting we are the author of the story, and that we are the Son of God, only having a nightmare because we took the tiny, mad idea of the separation seriously for a while.

Here is the interview with Gary Renard, interview with Bill Gladstone on planet stone TV, as posted earlier in a pulse.

Logion 80 is a mind bender, unless you understand the frame of reference of the teachings of Jesus in a comprehensive way, which means from the point of view of the whole thought system. For without that, individual statements can seem odd or strange, contradictory or plain idiotic. I also view that, just like Zen koans, as intended in the exact same spirit of inviting the reader to let go of their habitual judgments and views, but rather to accept a new challenge that can get us off of our old dead-end, and on to a new track, the Jesus track (or Krishna, or Buddha, or Quan Yin, or the Holy Spirit), but in any case the track out of the labyrinth and home to Heaven with our Father, where nice kids go to play.

The dead-end is the world of the body, the world of time and space, of limitations, of locality, of specificity, and the world of our false self, or the ego. In the words of Albert Einstein we (as would-be individuals) are non-local beings, having a local experience. We are eternal spirit, having an experience in time and space in which death seems very real and inevitable, but just like playing a role on stage, while it is helpful to really identify with the character, it becomes a bit of a problem if you end up thinking that you are the character. Shakespeare obviously grasped this in his “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” etc.  Another favorite expression of it comes from the famous lines from The Tempest:

Such are the dead-end dream lives we seem to live in this world, and if that is who we think we are, there is no hope. We live “On borrowed time” (Never sounded so heart-rending as in the classical rendition of the J. Geils Band), for death is invariably the end, sooner or later. On the other hand, if we really come to understand the illusory nature of the body, that it is merely a perception problem and a role we play, not a reality we are, then we immediately see through the whole world as well, and the “world is not worthy of us” at that point, because this world really is not our home, and becomes irrelevant, so that it fades into the mist, once the memory of our true home in Heaven is restored to us. In all then, I think Jesus speaks tongue-in-cheek in this logion, when he uses the phrase “…of that one the world is not worthy,” and he was a punster in several of the Thomas logia, as he was also experienced by Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford during the time when they took down A Course In Miracles. What he means is not only that the world is beneath us at that point, but:

And then there’s the saying in Logion 86, another “prequel” to the New Testament (Mt. 8:20, Lk 9:58, and with apparent roots in the Q sayings collection also), which reads:

The whole point then is that waking up, as Jesus in essence calls up on us to do, with his exhortations to “follow him” to a “Kingdom not of this world,” means waking up first to the fact that this world is not our home, and that there must be “another way” to live. Simply put, as long as we think that our lives work, and are tolerable, we are not motivated to go look for an alternative, so Jesus always addresses the dissatisfaction with the ways of the earth in us with the assurance that there is indeed another way. He is not a new age guru who is interested in helping to make the world a better place. Once we commit to following him, the world does serve a purpose again:

In short the world is merely a perception problem of which we suffer as long as we mistakenly take the “tiny, mad idea” of the separation seriously, and it is our own discomfort in this dream existence, which inevitably wakes us up from it to the realization that this world is not our home and that we are finally willing to deal with, and reluctantly entertain, the possibility that Jesus was right and we were wrong. Jesus’ teachings sound the sound of cognitive dissonance, to the point that wakes us up through the incongruities of our seeming experience, so he can lead us out of the desert of the ego, and back to the reality of Heaven.

Logion 79 works with contrast to demonstrate the difference between the ego thought system and that of the Holy Spirit. Between determining meaning and value in the present from the past and living fully in the present. In a way it anticipates the theme of Logion 99, which also uses family relationships to show it is not the past that matters or determines who we are, neither what we did, nor what anyone else might have done, but the only thing that matters is “to hear the word of the father,” and to keep it, right now.

It matters not what you may or may not have done in the world, there are no merit points for that, but living the will of God is the answer. This is a really radical teaching, and one that we all have a great deal of trouble with, for the conditioning goes very deep of looking into where we came from who our parents were, etc. all of which is about building up the meaning of the ego, and never being present in the present. Doing God’s Will, is all about putting him first and ourselves second, and doing so, there is no need for our interpretation (from the past), so we can just be who we are. Here is the beautiful text of Lesson 328:

Simply put then there’s only one job to be done, and that is to accept the Atonement – which completely cancels out the ego’s “tiny, mad idea” of the separation. The path of forgiveness which Jesus teaches thus is nothing more than the practice that gets us there from within our time-bound experience, and gives us experiential glimpses of our immortal reality as spirit in eternity, and it is those experiences, the miracles, which can convey more than words can ever hold, so that increasingly the very same words open up, since having had the experience the real meaning of what Jesus taught becomes readily evident. Many people throughout the ages have known that experiences, and in our own time teachers such as Eckhart Tolle and Jeff Foster have also reported this experience of suddenly understanding the words of Jesus on a whole different level, because they now understand him based on their own inner experience. So if accepting the Atonement, i.e. total and complete forgiveness, is our one function, then Logion 76 becomes understandable as a reminder of that, it says (as always in the Pursah version from chapter 7 of Gary Renard’s Your Immortal Reality:

Forgiveness and the Atonement are also not perishable goods, they are our savings account in eternity, so while we practice forgiveness here, everything is saved up for us until our full memory of Heaven is restored to us, and we can claim our full inheritance, by waking up. Again in the words of the Course:

So what he promises here, is that he issues HS Green Stamps (as opposed to S&H Green Stamps at the supermarket), and he is pasting everyone of them in your little savingsbook, until you are ready to come and claim the award. As a side note, we might notice that this logion finds a close parallel in Logion 8.

That’s how the Course speaks of the holy relationship, which is the Holy Spirit’s answer to the special relationships our ego favors. Simply put the ego’s special relationships are geared to running away from home, they are the pacifiers (addictions) that help us forget our home in Heaven, and give us the temporary satisfactions and distractions which will keep us rooted in the world. The holy relationship is born to us when we put our special relationships in the hand of the Holy Spirit, so that they can serve as a classroom for our way home. So every special relationship becomes a doorway – and as in Roman mythology above every doorway symbolically is the double head of Janus, one face facing towards time, and the other facing eternity, and thus symbolizing how every situation represents a choice opportunity.

Logion 75 has us standing at the doorway, and it refers to the fact that only those who are alone will enter “the bridal suite,” which is the expression in traditional literature that corresponds to the Course’s notion of the holy relationship. Those who are alone are those who no longer invest in and depend on special relationships, because they are aware now that there is only one of us, the Son of God, and they are thus learning to make the choice for eternity, for the Holy Spirit, so that every situation becomes a classroom in which the Holy Spirit can teach us to find our way home. And the way to choose the Holy Spirit is always by not choosing the ego, which is to say practicing forgiveness, and using every opportunity to let another block to “love’s presence” be removed from our mind.

The corollary to this is the notion in the Course that the world was made as an attack on God (ACIM:W-pII3.2:1), and all our special relationships are the ego’s tools to deny the oneness of the sonship, and thus to give up our investment in them, and letting go of the specialness is felt by the ego as being alone, but it is really the return to the oneness of the sonship, the oneness of the mind. And the experience of seeing the face of Christ in our brother, is the restoration of this oneness to our awareness. And thus is every relationship no longer special but simply an expression of the Holy Relationship.

The introduction to A Course In Miracles contains the following wonderful lines:

Logion 70 always makes me think of the above line. Removing the blocks to love’s presence, will bring it out in our lives, and that will literally save us. But as long as we fail to do the forgiveness work that will remove the “blocks” and bring out the love, we are stuck in the mire of the ego thought system, and it will kill us, quite literally. Jesus, or the Holy Spirit is the only option that offers life, for all else – the whole ego thought system – is little else but death, and the ego literally wants to kill us. So this saying is short and sweet and to the point, and should sound almost familiar to anyone studying Jesus’s teachings in the Course.

Logion 67 strikes the same note as the previous one, namely that the two thought systems, that of the ego and the world, the state in which we imagine ourselves separated from God, and the thought system of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, are mutually exclusive. Here the point is simply the complete emptiness of the ego thought system.

So if we know it “all,” all there is to know in the world, we will still be empty inside, and living in the ego’s sense of scarcity and lack – the Logion says “completely lacking.”  The key thing of course is that Jesus makes this statement because, as long as we consider ourselves “rich” in terms of the world, be it knowledge, relationships, possessions, etc., we will not be motivated to change our mind at all. We are then stuck, clinging to the things of the world. So the first step towards getting ready to seek “another way” which Jesus offers, is to realize the emptiness inside, and that the world really had nothing to offer. So this saying and others like it, could be the first step.

The riches of the world are really best summed up in the old Tom Lehrer song, “Smut” when he sings “More, more, more and still not satisfied,” for any amount of what the world has to offer still leaves that gaping hole of emptiness inside.

And here is how A Course in Miracles expresses this mutual exclusivity of the world and the Kingdom: