31.01.06
0103 – A branching of…
Posted in the Branch at 12:53 am by Linda 
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from Issue 001 May 2000
James and I have been toying with the idea of doing a newsletter for a few years. We facilitate an ongoing study-group and have given talks and lectures based on ACIM for a number of years now. Producing a newsletter seems to be the next logical step, something in the ‘ethers’ so to speak.
At different times people have expressed gratitude to James and I for providing a forum in which to discuss the ideas presented by the great, but sometimes difficult teaching of A Course in Miracles. That has always gladdened me and I am equally appreciative of having the opportunity to explore something that I love, in the company of others. Writing a newsletter provides another opportunity for me to focus on this teaching and basically talk to myself about it. Once again I am gladdened if others can gain something from these ruminations.
So why call it Branching of the Road? The very occasion of starting up a newsletter has provided me with an opportunity to reflect upon what this enigmatic symbol from Chapter 22 of the text signifies. Within myself I am aware of the temptation to give the production of a newsletter a significance I do not give to other things I do. It is somehow special or qualitatively different. Yet the Course reminds us that it is not what we do or don’t do in the world that really matters. It is how we do it or more specifically whom we do it with, the voice for separation and fear or the voice for unity and love. The only thing of any consequence (the consequence being the world as I see it) is how I hold things in my mind as it is on that level that I do have a choice. That choice is qualitatively different from the myriad of choices I seemed to have made before because none of those choices ever led me to question the very basis of the world as I saw it.
This choice point is the branching of the road. Inwardly I can move in a direction that seems to enmesh me even further in the apparent significance of my ego thoughts and how I see the world. I can also step back from my thoughts and give Jesus or the Holy Spirit the quietness within which I can at last listen and learn of another way. As the Course teaches, we are the Son of God and nothing can take away from the power inherent in our choice or will. Our capacity to learn or more accurately unlearn is an expression of that power and is inviolate as our responsibility. That is in fact the only responsibility we do have.
So the question is never what I am doing (as Graham often says, do it or don’t do it, but just get on with it). It is whom I am doing it with. And that choice is made again and again and again. As Jesus asks of us in the beginning of the text: give me your ego and all it’s bodily concerns so that I can guide you in what really matters—your mind and it’s thoughts. To think that there is ever anything else going on is to fall for the ego’s ploy of establishing a hierarchy of illusions and in effect making the error real.
I feel very blessed to have found a teaching, which genuinely offers a way out of the seeming tyranny of this world and its apparently endless machinations. It is at the branching of the road that we begin to awaken to another way. Having done so, thank God, the end is as inevitable as our Father and our very Self. LH