Skipping the Primal Concepts
In reading A Course in Miracles © we encounter massive barriers which make no logical sense to our ‘thinking’ minds. The thought reversals required are so enormous that to undertake them would seemingly collapse our world and consume us into nothingness, our greatest fear. So most of us read on, word after word, chapter after chapter, book after book, blissfully avoiding the primal concepts as we load our memory with ideas and quotes and feel we have gained some understanding of something. But other than regurgitable quotes (yes, it’s a real word) that we don’t understand, have we? Or have we just ended up smugly stuck in a familiar mental cul-de-sac?
What amazes me is my ability to instantly forget what I’ve just read, and/or to conveniently and perhaps often unconsciously refuse to consider or understand the concept. It seems to me that, in group study sessions, instead of reading the next section, and satisfying ourselves with how much we’ve covered, we should stay on the paragraph, sentence, or word we are on until we understand it. Everyone should read the same section again, then attempt to understand and explain it in their own words. And if we don’t understand it, which we probably don’t, the most useful endeavor may be to get a clear picture of the extent to which we do not understand it. I consider the ACIM to be an alien thought system. Not as in ‘ET’ aliens and spaceships, but thoughts which are alien to our minds, which are specifically programmed to operate on opposite concepts.
In opening the course in the middle of the night and reading some of the earlier concepts, upon which all the rest of the course is built, it seems clear to me that I’m spending 99% of my effort on trying to understand concepts which are impossible to understand without a massive reversal of thought. Our natural inclination is to consider thought reversal as changing our thoughts to another type (changing evil thoughts to pure thoughts, or Ford to Chevy) while the thinking mechanism never skips a beat, but I think our dishonesty here is blatant. In Chapter 12 around the area of ‘The Sane Curriculum’ alone (or anywhere else for that matter) the primal concepts that we gloss over are clearly apparent if we are honest with ourselves. I’ll point out two among many, although the many are really one. One concept is that we will undertake a journey (to discover meaning) as we are not at home in this world. Another is that love is strong because it is undivided, and the recognition of our own invulnerability is so important to the restoration of our sanity.
To accept these statements (and others like them) as true it seems to me takes more than intellectual understanding or memorization. I think these statements require more than a modification of mental content and actions, and more than a restructuring of our deepest and most cherished beliefs. It seems to me they call for an unlimited courage and willingness to step off a cliff and to trust another order, which I would assume fundamentally adapts our mental capacities to see another order of existence.
What am I saying? I’m not sure. But for me, I think there is more value is pondering, even if unable to ‘understand’, the major concepts the ACIM presents rather than memorizing meaningless details that are downstream of those concepts. When you are up against a massive mountain that seems impassible, how do you deal with it? Maybe the first step is to simply grasp the enormity of it and try to be open to a way being found.
