There’s a line in the text of A Course in Miracles, in the chapter called The Innocent Perception, that I’ve built years of practice on.
“The way to correct distortions is to withdraw your faith in them and invest it only in what is true.”
I’d like to break this down, because it’s profoundly helpful. What are distortions? Distortions are the upsets, the irritations, the frustration, sadness, hurt, despair, anger, resentment, regret, jealousy, blame, and shame. All that emotional disturbance.
Those disturbances are the result of thinking thoughts that aren’t true. The thoughts that aren’t true are the distortions, and distortions cause disturbance. Every way in which we’re believing something that isn’t actually true is going to create a disturbance.
There’s a test built right into this. The truth sets us free. The truth doesn’t disturb us, it doesn’t upset us, it doesn’t pain us, it doesn’t frighten us, it doesn’t hurt us, and it doesn’t cause depression. So whenever we’re disturbed emotionally, we’re choosing to believe thoughts that aren’t true. That’s the whole diagnostic, and it’s available to us in any moment.
The very next line is just as direct:
“You cannot make untruth true.”
We can try. We can work our whole life, every minute of every day, to make our belief system true, and it never will be. Truth is true. ONLY the truth is true. Belief systems are distortions.
Here’s the beautiful part. What’s true is true for everyone the same, which gives us a litmus test we can actually use. If there’s something wrong with you, there’d have to be something wrong with everyone, and it’d have to be the identical thing. So whatever you BELIEVE is wrong with you isn’t TRUE, it’s not real. It’s a temporary distortion.
Likewise, whatever’s true for anyone you sense has a grasp on the truth is also true for you. If they’re perfect love, so are you. If they’re innocent so are you.
That’s what the whole workbook is about, withdrawing our faith from the distorted beliefs, which we must do one thought at a time. The great thing is that the Holy Spirit only presents to us one thought at a time.
If you’d like to work with those thoughts one at a time, together, my End My Self-Sabotage program is six weeks beginning Sunday, July 26.
We’re withdrawing our faith from what was never true and choosing liberation.
My End My Self-Sabotage program is six weeks of getting real with ourselves about what’s really going on – and doing it together.
Sometimes when we become overwhelmed and upset by what we think we see we find ways to drown out the intensity of our reactions. We fall into various forms of self-medication and self-sabotage. I know a lot about that. And that’s why I created this program to rise up out of that pain.
End My Self-Sabotage 6-Week Program begins Sunday, July 26. Self-sabotage is designed to slow down our spiritual growth. But what if I told you that we can dissolve that pattern? When you recognize the pattern, you can interrupt it. And when you interrupt it with Love instead of willpower, everything changes. I used to struggle with self-medication and other forms of self-sabotage, but that’s behind me now – if you can relate – let’s do it together! Click here to learn more.
https://youtu.be/IU_-3jHDY9E
