Lesson 322. I can give up but what was never real.
I sacrifice illusions; nothing more. And as illusions go I find the gifts
illusions tried to hide, awaiting me in shining welcome, and in readiness to
give God's ancient messages to me. His memory abides in every gift that I
receive of Him. And every dream serves only to conceal the Self which is God's
only Son, the likeness of Himself, the Holy One Who still abides in Him forever,
as He still abides in me.
Father, to You all sacrifice remains forever inconceivable. And so I cannot
sacrifice except in dreams. As You created me, I can give up nothing You gave
me. What You did not give has no reality. What loss can I anticipate except the
loss of fear, and the return of love into my mind?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Below, is from Kenneth Wapnick's commentaries on this lesson, from "Journey
Through the Workbook of A Course in Miracles," which can be purchased at the
following site: ~ M. Street.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lesson 322. "I can give up but what was never real."
*Lessons 322 and 323 deal with the important theme of sacrifice. While it is not
a major theme in the workbook, it is prominent in the text and deserves some
discussion here. Sacrifice is the reigning principle of the ego's thought system
-- if we are to get what we want, someone or something must be sacrificed: <one
or the other>. In the beginning, it was God's Love that was sacrificed in order
to secure our individuality. Following the law of projection, once sacrifice was
made real we believed it would be used against us, and that God would in turn
demand sacrifice of His sinful Son.
Moreover, as the principle behind the birth of our individual identities,
sacrifice also governs the world, not to mention being the ego's mode of
self-preservation. Therefore, all selves emanating from that thought system
share the belief that salvation means sacrifice. If, for example, the ego's God
is to be saved from my sinful attack on Him, He is going to demand I sacrifice.
Thus we believe God asks us to give up something that is ours. This is the basis
of many world religions, and has been a crucial theme in Christianity: Jesus had
to be sacrificed so we could be forgiven by God and share His eternal life. The
ego thus has us believe that in order to retrieve God's Love we have to pay for
it by returning the life we stole, thereby paradoxically regaining it in the
hereafter. However, we do not want to give it all back, because then we would
disappear, and so we do it piecemeal: a little bit of happiness, pleasure, or
the body's blood -- but never everything.
Since we believe God demands we give back the separated selves we have judged to
be real, Jesus needs to remind us that we give up a thought system that was
illusory from the beginning. Thus he explains in the text how this course
"requires almost nothing of you. It is impossible to imagine one that asks so
little, or could offer more" (T-20.VII.1:7-8). He tells us all he requires is
for us to let go of the ego which is essentially nothing. To us, of course, the
ego is everything; and so letting it go is deemed sacrificial. People in
religious life -- and unfortunately this goes for students of A Course in
Miracles as well -- have shifted the focus of sacrifice from the <content> to
the <form>. Consequently, they believe that God demands they give up pleasure --
sex, food, money, and comfort. Thus does the ego twist the concept of sacrifice
in its favor and has us give up certain behaviors, which leads us to believe we
have accomplished something meaningful. However, the underlying ego thought
system remains intact, the ego's motivation from the beginning. Jesus explains
many times that sacrifice has given rise in the strange idea of martyrdom (e.g.,
T-3.1; T-6.1), wherein we become martyred to salvation. That is why people
struggle to give up addictions, habits, and relationships, for they think this
is what is asked of them. However, if we give up the <form> and retain the
<content>, we have given up nothing. That does not mean it is not helpful at
times to change behavior, but if we do not change the mind's underlying thought
system, changing behavior is only half the job, as Jesus says in this familiar
passage on sickness:
"The miracle is useless if you learn but that the body can be healed, for
this is not the lesson it was sent to teach. The lesson is the <mind> was sick
that thought the body could be sick; projecting out its guilt caused nothing,
and had no effects." (T-28.II.11.6-7) *
(1) "I sacrifice illusions; nothing more. And as illusions go I find the gifts
illusions tried to hide, awaiting me in shining welcome, and in readiness to
give God's ancient messages to me. His memory abides in every gift that I
receive of Him. And every dream serves only to conceal the Self which is God's
only Son, the likeness of Himself, the Holy One Who still abides in Him forever,
as He still abides in me."
*The key phrase is "every dream serves only to conceal the Self." This a major
emphasis of Jesus' teaching throughout A Course in Miracles: that we become
aware of the purpose of the ego thought system to which we have given our
allegiance. Our dreams of specialness and sacrifice are purposive; that is,
there is a reason we choose to be miserable. We come into this body to keep from
awareness the mind's power to choose our Self rather than the ego. This
subterfuge is what we need to see: our macrocosmic and microcosmic worlds are
part of ego's carefully contrived plot to keep us from returning to the mind,
where we would certainly choose truth instead of illusion, and correction
instead sin. Sacrifice of the body, then, becomes the central concept in the
ego's plan for <its> salvation.*
(2:1-2) "Father, to You all sacrifice remains forever inconceivable. And so I
cannot sacrifice except in dreams."
*In Heaven, loss is impossible. However, within the dream we call our lives, we
can indeed sacrifice, believing we are asked to give up our most treasured
possession: the "priceless pearl" (T-23.II.11:2) of our identity, surrounded by
the ego's specialness. Within our experience here, therefore, this special self
-- born of sacrifice, and sustained and threatened by it at the same time -- is
real and important to us. It is only when we step outside of the dream with
Jesus that we can look back and say: "My God, I am holding on to nothing. Not
only that, what I have been clinging to is making me miserable and unhappy, for
I identify with a self that does not even exist. Why, except in insanity, would
I continue to choose to do this?" *
(2:3-5) "As You created me, I can give up nothing You gave me. What You did not
give has no reality. What loss can I anticipate except the loss of fear, and the
return of love into my mind?"
*In other words, all we give up is an illusion, because God did not give the
separated self to us. What He did give -- our Identity as Christ -- we can never
lose, and what He did not give has no reality. That is why it is imperative for
almost everyone in this world -- whether they are religious or not -- to believe
in a God or some greater principle that gave them life. For the same reason,
many students of A Course in Miracles have difficulty with the idea that God did
not create this world, and why religions need to have God involved here in some
way. If He did not give us this world or body, they have no reality, and so we
can have no true existence here. Recognizing that we do not exist at all is our
greatest fear, but we support, reinforce, and save our special identities by
bringing God into them, believing we are born into this world as bodies that
lives deemed to be holy, part of an ongoing spiritual activity or divine
process.
Therefore, a passage such as the above is one of the most dreaded thoughts the
ego can hear. Again, it is terrifying to be told that God did not give us this
body or our specialness. In truth, He gave only Himself through extending His
Love, and this has nothing to do with the world or our illusory self.*
