Hi All,
Today I recalled that these could be easily accessed by going to the search box ROFL!
Here is my main go to site which answers the content of all questions about ACIM. It also looks at the question re: consciousness/Consciousness. It is well worth having at your fingertips. I have been allowed to post some on the site There are close to 1000 Q & As in this collection!
From The??
Q #853: Chapter 4 of "All Are Called", volume I in The Message of A Course in Miracles , goes through a lengthy description of our three selves. I got bogged down several times trying to "cut to the chase." Please tell me if I got it right: self A is the holy Son of God who for a brief moment freaked out and thereby was no longer a whole. As a result, self A realized that he was now in the land of good and evil and felt guilty for that. Next, self A figured out that if he blamed somebody else -- self B -- then he wouldn't feel guilt any more. So self B became an innocent victim of self A. Self C becomes the victim of the body and hates everybody. And around and around it goes?
A: A valiant effort, but let's see if we can get a little more clarity on this central part of the ego's myth of separation and sin, as uncovered in the Course. The description of the three selves you refer to in Chapter 4 of The Message of A Course in Miracles, Vol. I, is actually an extension to the level of the world and individual bodies of what was presented in Chapter 2 to explain the initial A-B-C split at the level of thought in the mind, prior to the projection of bodies and the world. And so it is there, in the mind, that we need to begin, if what you refer to in Chapter 4 is going to make any sense.
Beginning then at the level of mind, self A is not the holy Son of God, but an illusory thought of a separate self that we as the sleeping Son believe we have wrested from God when we wanted the separation from Him to be real. It is a fiction we have made up in our feverish ego dream and identified with, calling it ourselves. And this separate self is the original home of sin and guilt, according to the ego's story, because its life came selfishly at God's expense, destroying His Oneness to bring itself into a separate, autonomous existence.
At this point in the Son's delusional mind, there is nothing else -- no land that self A seems to occupy, no world, and no other self. Now to deal with the immense guilt his ego says is real over destroying God Himself, yes, the Son as self A would like to blame someone else, to dump the guilt elsewhere. But there is no one else to blame, no other self. So the solution, drawing on the only dynamic available in the Son's split mind -- the thought of separation -- is to separate self A into two selves, B and C, identifying with self B and pushing all the guilt onto self C. Self C, in the Son's insane imagination, now becomes the angry wrathful God who is going to punish the Son, self B, for his sin against Him. But of course, the sin and guilt in self C, now seen as separate from self B, are nothing other than the sin and guilt of self A, split off. But this is what enables the Son, now identified with self B, to believe that the guilt is no longer in him, that he is now "innocent." All of this is as much a delusional fantasy as the initial making of self A.
And so self A has seemed to vanish from the scene, leaving only self B and self C in the mind. As the Son we are now identified with the "innocent" self B, who is the potential victim of self C, in whom all the sin and guilt now reside. Again, this is all happening only at the level of thought. For the drama to play out and allow us to convince ourselves that we are truly "innocent" victims, we need a world of time and space and, in particular, bodies. For bodies are vulnerable and weak, and demonstrate quite convincingly that we are powerless to change in any significant way what happens to us -- clear-cut criteria for victimhood. And so the mind seems to fragment into millions of pieces, but each fragment retains that same progression from a guilty self A to an innocent self B, with all the guilt now residing in a guilty self C, the self split off from self A that we no longer identify with. And every fragment in the Son's mind seems to play out this conflict, now projected from the mind onto the screen of the world, each desperately attempting to affirm its innocence by demonstrating everyone else's guilt. And you need a body to be able to point the finger of blame. Except that every fragment is trying to play the same blame game. And so to ourselves, we are each an innocent self B, but to everyone else, we're another victimizing self C. And the guilt is swapped back and forth, but its reality is never questioned.
It is only when we can shift our identification away from the B-C split in the world back to the guilty but forgotten self A in the mind that we can begin to look at our own guilt, which has nothing to do with the seeming relationship between B and C in the world. For they are only shadows of the thought of guilt in the mind. And when we return our attention to the illusory self A in the mind, we can at last begin to question the reality of the guilt. It is through this process of recognizing first where the guilt originates, and then questioning its reality, which is what the Course means by forgiveness, that we begin to remember the truly innocent self A' that we all share (see chapter 5 of volume I of The Message ). At the same time, while we still remain identified with the body in the world, we will begin to see self B' and self C' as the same, rather than as different -- both caught in an insane thought system, believing that guilt is real and desperately looking to escape it. Over time, as we practice forgiveness, we will identify more and more with the innocent self A', a reflection of our true Self as Christ, Who has nothing to do with any As or Bs or Cs.
For additional discussion of the splits in the mind which are expressed in the world, see Questions #176 and #630.
For more on the four splits:
Q #630: I remember hearing Ken Wapnick, on a workshop tape, say that as the wrong mind splits the right mind also splits. Would you review these right-minded splits?
A: The right-minded splits are not splits per se but are simply the Holy Spirit's corrections for the deceptions of the ego's wrong-minded splits. Since we find ourselves self-identified as bodies in the world, at the end of the series of splits the ego has led us along to take us as far away as it possibly can from the truth of Who we are as spirit, the right-minded answer is simply the undoing of those splits, in reverse order.
Briefly, the ego's first split is what seems to cast us out of the oneness of Heaven, beginning the dream of separation which seems to establish us as a separate mind that has consciousness and independence from its Source. At this point, our illusory independent existence is very vulnerable, very fragile, since it takes very little to remember our reality as God's only Son, perfectly joined with Him and perfectly at peace, which is what the Holy Spirit in our mind represents. And so to protect our individuality, the second split involves our choice to identify completely with the ego and split the Holy Spirit off from our awareness, thereby forgetting that the ego is a choice we have made and not our reality.
The third ego split encompasses the ego's ingenious myth of sin, guilt and fear, in which we view the separation not only as real, but as a sinful attack on God, destroying Him as a consequence of having disrupted the perfect unity of Heaven in which God has His Being. The guilt over this sin is overwhelming and **our only defense against it, if it is real, is to split the sin and guilt off, projecting them outside ourselves onto a made-up God,** Who becomes the wrathful avenger, intent on vengeance against us for our sin against Him.
But, as with each of the ego's splits, this leads to its own set of problems, requiring yet another defensive split. For if I exist in the mind with this maniacal God, bent on my destruction, I need to escape. And so the fourth and final split involves projecting my own identity out into a world of form and bodies, escaping my mind and hiding in the world. But what the ego has failed to tell me is that this solution involves the projection of all the contents of my wrong-mind into the world of form, so that I now live in a world of fear. For the sin and guilt are all still around me, but now external to me in the world and in all my relationships. And so the original vulnerability and fragility of the thought of separation in my mind is now the basis of my identity as a body in the world. Of course, the advantage of this final arrangement is that I am still an individual, but it seems that forces beyond my control have brought about my existence. And if I am the innocent victim of the sinful, guilty world, how can I be held accountable for that original attack on God. How could I possibly be that powerful? Just look at this pathetically weak self I am, despite my best efforts to strengthen and protect myself physically, psychologically and emotionally against a hostile world!
And so it is here we find ourselves, as far removed from our true Identity as spirit as the ego could possibly entice us to go. And it is with this fourth split that the right-minded correction must begin. We are not asked to deny our experience of ourselves as bodies in the world -- the result of the fourth split -- but to be open to a different interpretation of that experience. Rather than focusing on differences as the ego has encouraged us to do -- seeing my innocence as dependent on proving your guilt -- A Course in Miracles is inviting us first to begin to recognize that we are all the same, struggling with our feelings of guilt by trying to project them on to everyone else. In other words, we all share the same guilt and the same need to be released from it. As we begin to accept this idea of shared interests, we will become more aware that we are a mind that is making choices to see the world and others in certain ways, rather than simply a victimized body, although we will almost certainly continue to experience ourselves as victims much of the time. And so we gradually begin to undo the final split.
As we begin to see the world and our relationships differently, we will be more willing to look at the sin and guilt buried in our own mind, recognizing its real source in our identification with the ego, thereby beginning to reduce our investment in the third split. And the right-minded correction for this willingness to look honestly will be the recognition that there is an alternative in our mind to the sin, guilt and fear that up until now we have felt the need to split off and project outside of ourselves. And that alternative is the Holy Spirit, the Reminder of the true innocence we share with everyone else, as we let go of the need to make differences real. And so the wall between the right mind and the wrong mind that we have attempted to make impenetrable with the second split begins to become more porous, allowing more of the light of the right mind to shine on the darkness of the wrong mind, revealing increasingly its illusory nature.
The undoing of these three splits is the focus of the Course's teachings and it involves a process that will require great willingness on our part over time, for the self we are identified with in the world -- the result of the fourth split -- will lose its meaning and appeal to us over time as we practice the forgiveness that healing the splits requires. But along the way, that shift engenders tremendous fear so long as we still have an investment in the separation and in our separate, unique, individual self being real.
At the end of the process, once we have allowed the barrier we have imposed between the right mind and the wrong mind to dissolve completely in the light of total forgiveness, we will be in the real world, still aware of the dream of separation but completely unaffected by it. And it is from this place of complete healing that we are ready for the undoing of the first split, accomplished by what the Course metaphorically refers to as God's last step (e.g., T.7.I), in which He lifts us up out of the illusion of duality and returns us to the absolute oneness of Heaven, which in reality we have never left.
Although the process of undoing the splits is described here as if it were linear, in reality it is not, as the miracle, or the holy instant, which is involved in undoing the second, third and fourth splits, occurs outside of time and space. And so our experience will be that we will be moving back and forth between the various levels of the splits over and over again, over time. For example, the Holy Spirit may seem to be a part of our healing process almost from the beginning of our work with the Course, yet we will not really understand the nature of His reality until we have come to understand the nature of the split mind more fully. And despite our increasing recognition that our only real choice is made in the mind, we will continue to get caught in our victim scripts in the world and will need to remind ourselves that we are really the same as all our brothers and sisters.
Those interested in a more in-depth exploration of the four splits may find the tape set, Separation and Forgiveness: The Four Splits and Their Undoing, and volume I, "All Are Called," from the two-volume book set, The Message of A Course in Miracles (both publications by Kenneth Wapnick) helpful.
From the FACIM Question & Answer Service (astericks/highlighting are mine)Q #853: Chapter 4 of "All Are Called", volume I in The Message of A Course in Miracles , goes through a lengthy description of our three selves. I got bogged down several times trying to "cut to the chase." Please tell me if I got it right: self A is the holy Son of God who for a brief moment freaked out and thereby was no longer a whole. As a result, self A realized that he was now in the land of good and evil and felt guilty for that. Next, self A figured out that if he blamed somebody else -- self B -- then he wouldn't feel guilt any more. So self B became an innocent victim of self A. Self C becomes the victim of the body and hates everybody. And around and around it goes?
A: A valiant effort, but let's see if we can get a little more clarity on this central part of the ego's myth of separation and sin, as uncovered in the Course. The description of the three selves you refer to in Chapter 4 of The Message of A Course in Miracles, Vol. I, is actually an extension to the level of the world and individual bodies of what was presented in Chapter 2 to explain the initial A-B-C split at the level of thought in the mind, prior to the projection of bodies and the world. And so it is there, in the mind, that we need to begin, if what you refer to in Chapter 4 is going to make any sense.
Beginning then at the level of mind, self A is not the holy Son of God, but an illusory thought of a separate self that we as the sleeping Son believe we have wrested from God when we wanted the separation from Him to be real. It is a fiction we have made up in our feverish ego dream and identified with, calling it ourselves. And this separate self is the original home of sin and guilt, according to the ego's story, because its life came selfishly at God's expense, destroying His Oneness to bring itself into a separate, autonomous existence.
At this point in the Son's delusional mind, there is nothing else -- no land that self A seems to occupy, no world, and no other self. Now to deal with the immense guilt his ego says is real over destroying God Himself, yes, the Son as self A would like to blame someone else, to dump the guilt elsewhere. But there is no one else to blame, no other self. So the solution, drawing on the only dynamic available in the Son's split mind -- the thought of separation -- is to separate self A into two selves, B and C, identifying with self B and pushing all the guilt onto self C. Self C, in the Son's insane imagination, now becomes the angry wrathful God who is going to punish the Son, self B, for his sin against Him. But of course, the sin and guilt in self C, now seen as separate from self B, are nothing other than the sin and guilt of self A, split off. But this is what enables the Son, now identified with self B, to believe that the guilt is no longer in him, that he is now "innocent." All of this is as much a delusional fantasy as the initial making of self A.
And so self A has seemed to vanish from the scene, leaving only self B and self C in the mind. As the Son we are now identified with the "innocent" self B, who is the potential victim of self C, in whom all the sin and guilt now reside. Again, this is all happening only at the level of thought. For the drama to play out and allow us to convince ourselves that we are truly "innocent" victims, we need a world of time and space and, in particular, bodies. For bodies are vulnerable and weak, and demonstrate quite convincingly that we are powerless to change in any significant way what happens to us -- clear-cut criteria for victimhood. And so the mind seems to fragment into millions of pieces, but each fragment retains that same progression from a guilty self A to an innocent self B, with all the guilt now residing in a guilty self C, the self split off from self A that we no longer identify with. And every fragment in the Son's mind seems to play out this conflict, now projected from the mind onto the screen of the world, each desperately attempting to affirm its innocence by demonstrating everyone else's guilt. And you need a body to be able to point the finger of blame. Except that every fragment is trying to play the same blame game. And so to ourselves, we are each an innocent self B, but to everyone else, we're another victimizing self C. And the guilt is swapped back and forth, but its reality is never questioned.
It is only when we can shift our identification away from the B-C split in the world back to the guilty but forgotten self A in the mind that we can begin to look at our own guilt, which has nothing to do with the seeming relationship between B and C in the world. For they are only shadows of the thought of guilt in the mind. And when we return our attention to the illusory self A in the mind, we can at last begin to question the reality of the guilt. It is through this process of recognizing first where the guilt originates, and then questioning its reality, which is what the Course means by forgiveness, that we begin to remember the truly innocent self A' that we all share (see chapter 5 of volume I of The Message ). At the same time, while we still remain identified with the body in the world, we will begin to see self B' and self C' as the same, rather than as different -- both caught in an insane thought system, believing that guilt is real and desperately looking to escape it. Over time, as we practice forgiveness, we will identify more and more with the innocent self A', a reflection of our true Self as Christ, Who has nothing to do with any As or Bs or Cs.
For additional discussion of the splits in the mind which are expressed in the world, see Questions #176 and #630.
For more on the four splits:
Q #630: I remember hearing Ken Wapnick, on a workshop tape, say that as the wrong mind splits the right mind also splits. Would you review these right-minded splits?
A: The right-minded splits are not splits per se but are simply the Holy Spirit's corrections for the deceptions of the ego's wrong-minded splits. Since we find ourselves self-identified as bodies in the world, at the end of the series of splits the ego has led us along to take us as far away as it possibly can from the truth of Who we are as spirit, the right-minded answer is simply the undoing of those splits, in reverse order.
Briefly, the ego's first split is what seems to cast us out of the oneness of Heaven, beginning the dream of separation which seems to establish us as a separate mind that has consciousness and independence from its Source. At this point, our illusory independent existence is very vulnerable, very fragile, since it takes very little to remember our reality as God's only Son, perfectly joined with Him and perfectly at peace, which is what the Holy Spirit in our mind represents. And so to protect our individuality, the second split involves our choice to identify completely with the ego and split the Holy Spirit off from our awareness, thereby forgetting that the ego is a choice we have made and not our reality.
The third ego split encompasses the ego's ingenious myth of sin, guilt and fear, in which we view the separation not only as real, but as a sinful attack on God, destroying Him as a consequence of having disrupted the perfect unity of Heaven in which God has His Being. The guilt over this sin is overwhelming and **our only defense against it, if it is real, is to split the sin and guilt off, projecting them outside ourselves onto a made-up God,** Who becomes the wrathful avenger, intent on vengeance against us for our sin against Him.
But, as with each of the ego's splits, this leads to its own set of problems, requiring yet another defensive split. For if I exist in the mind with this maniacal God, bent on my destruction, I need to escape. And so the fourth and final split involves projecting my own identity out into a world of form and bodies, escaping my mind and hiding in the world. But what the ego has failed to tell me is that this solution involves the projection of all the contents of my wrong-mind into the world of form, so that I now live in a world of fear. For the sin and guilt are all still around me, but now external to me in the world and in all my relationships. And so the original vulnerability and fragility of the thought of separation in my mind is now the basis of my identity as a body in the world. Of course, the advantage of this final arrangement is that I am still an individual, but it seems that forces beyond my control have brought about my existence. And if I am the innocent victim of the sinful, guilty world, how can I be held accountable for that original attack on God. How could I possibly be that powerful? Just look at this pathetically weak self I am, despite my best efforts to strengthen and protect myself physically, psychologically and emotionally against a hostile world!
And so it is here we find ourselves, as far removed from our true Identity as spirit as the ego could possibly entice us to go. And it is with this fourth split that the right-minded correction must begin. We are not asked to deny our experience of ourselves as bodies in the world -- the result of the fourth split -- but to be open to a different interpretation of that experience. Rather than focusing on differences as the ego has encouraged us to do -- seeing my innocence as dependent on proving your guilt -- A Course in Miracles is inviting us first to begin to recognize that we are all the same, struggling with our feelings of guilt by trying to project them on to everyone else. In other words, we all share the same guilt and the same need to be released from it. As we begin to accept this idea of shared interests, we will become more aware that we are a mind that is making choices to see the world and others in certain ways, rather than simply a victimized body, although we will almost certainly continue to experience ourselves as victims much of the time. And so we gradually begin to undo the final split.
As we begin to see the world and our relationships differently, we will be more willing to look at the sin and guilt buried in our own mind, recognizing its real source in our identification with the ego, thereby beginning to reduce our investment in the third split. And the right-minded correction for this willingness to look honestly will be the recognition that there is an alternative in our mind to the sin, guilt and fear that up until now we have felt the need to split off and project outside of ourselves. And that alternative is the Holy Spirit, the Reminder of the true innocence we share with everyone else, as we let go of the need to make differences real. And so the wall between the right mind and the wrong mind that we have attempted to make impenetrable with the second split begins to become more porous, allowing more of the light of the right mind to shine on the darkness of the wrong mind, revealing increasingly its illusory nature.
The undoing of these three splits is the focus of the Course's teachings and it involves a process that will require great willingness on our part over time, for the self we are identified with in the world -- the result of the fourth split -- will lose its meaning and appeal to us over time as we practice the forgiveness that healing the splits requires. But along the way, that shift engenders tremendous fear so long as we still have an investment in the separation and in our separate, unique, individual self being real.
At the end of the process, once we have allowed the barrier we have imposed between the right mind and the wrong mind to dissolve completely in the light of total forgiveness, we will be in the real world, still aware of the dream of separation but completely unaffected by it. And it is from this place of complete healing that we are ready for the undoing of the first split, accomplished by what the Course metaphorically refers to as God's last step (e.g., T.7.I), in which He lifts us up out of the illusion of duality and returns us to the absolute oneness of Heaven, which in reality we have never left.
Although the process of undoing the splits is described here as if it were linear, in reality it is not, as the miracle, or the holy instant, which is involved in undoing the second, third and fourth splits, occurs outside of time and space. And so our experience will be that we will be moving back and forth between the various levels of the splits over and over again, over time. For example, the Holy Spirit may seem to be a part of our healing process almost from the beginning of our work with the Course, yet we will not really understand the nature of His reality until we have come to understand the nature of the split mind more fully. And despite our increasing recognition that our only real choice is made in the mind, we will continue to get caught in our victim scripts in the world and will need to remind ourselves that we are really the same as all our brothers and sisters.
Those interested in a more in-depth exploration of the four splits may find the tape set, Separation and Forgiveness: The Four Splits and Their Undoing, and volume I, "All Are Called," from the two-volume book set, The Message of A Course in Miracles (both publications by Kenneth Wapnick) helpful. Q #175: The following three questions all address the issue of death and so will be answered together:i: I would like to know more about "death solves nothing."ii: It is common for us to say when a person dies that he or she is finally "at peace." Does death of the ego not release us from it’s fear based thinking and grant us peace?iii: Would you kindly explain what A Course in Miracles teaches regarding finding peace after death?
A: Since everyone in this world suffers the excruciating pain of believing they are separated from their true Home and their Creator, there are times throughout one’s life that the thought of escape from this pain would seem to be a blessing. In this instance, death represents escape from our pain. And yet, A Course in Miracles teaches us that we are not our bodies: "The body is the symbol of what you think you are. It is clearly a separation device, and therefore does not exist (T.6.V.A.2:2,3). Therefore we need not escape from our bodies, whether they be physical, psychological, emotional, astral, etc. What we do need to escape from, however, is the thought of separation, and this is accomplished through the process of forgiveness. If the mind has not been totally healed of the thought of separation once the body "dies," the unforgiveness that it holds will be played out in other times and other forms until forgiveness is perfected. "When your body and your ego and your dreams are gone, you will know that you will last forever. Perhaps you think this is accomplished through death, but nothing is accomplished through death, because death is nothing" (T.6.V.A.1:1,2).At other times, we are may believe this world to be a spiritual testing ground, and death symbolizes an end to our testing, and our ticket back Home. Or we may believe that once we die, our egos are automatically transcended, and we will be at peace. Beliefs such as this tempt one to want death to come sooner rather than later. "There is a risk of thinking death is peace, because the world equates the body with the Self which God created" (T.27.VII.10:2). It is important to keep in mind that the "death of the ego" does not come from the body’s death, but rather from the process of forgiveness, which only occurs within the mind. And, our bodies may die with or without completing this process. You can see in any of this instances how we are tempted to attribute pain to our body rather than to our mind. Once we have learned where the real problem lies, the Holy Spirit can begin to use our body to teach us our true identity as a mind: "The Holy Spirit, as always, takes what you have made [the body] and translates it into a learning device....He reinterprets what the ego uses as an argument for separation into a demonstration against it (T.6.V.A.2:4,5).So death (which is nothing) of the body (also nothing) solves nothing (the thought of separation, another nothing). Nothing plus nothing equals nothing!
 With Gratitude,Marcy
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