12.03.06
The Obstacles to Peace - Part I (Apr 18, 1997)
Posted in Transcripts at 11:07 pm by miracles 
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A Talk by Linda and James Hale
Contents
- From the Opening Reading
- Context
- What is an Obstacle?
- The Holy Spirit’s Guarantee
- The First Obstacle to Peace: The desire to get rid of it.
- The Second Obstacle: the belief that the body is valuable for what it offers
From the Opening Reading (T-19.IV.C.11)
Take this from me and look upon it, judging it for me.
Let me not see it as a sign of sin and death, nor use it for destruction.
Teach me how not to make of it an obstacle to peace, but let You use it for me, to facilitate its coming.
T-19.IV.C.11:8-10
The collection of sections, The Obstacles To Peace appear just past the half way point through the Course. It follows on from the discussion of the holy relationship and the transformation of our perception of the world as a place of attack and fear to one of peace, through the invitation extended to the Holy Spirit to enter with us into our relationships. In particular, it is in the context of our invitation to the Holy Spirit, that these obstacles and how they are “overcome” is discussed.
Jesus also refers many times to himself in these sections. In particular to the images we have made of him, thus extending his discussion on the themes touched on when he spoke of the crucifixion and the resurrection.
He further clarifies the Course’s definition of communion, in direct contrast to the traditional Catholic meaning with respect to the sharing of his blood and flesh. [See T-19.IV.A.17]
The Obstacles To Peace is a very powerful section of the Course where the major themes of the Course’s theology are discussed and compared with the insanity of the ego and thus, how we actually, but mostly unconsciously, relate to each other, ourselves, and ultimately God.
The first three obstacles are basically concerned with attack, our chief mechanism to deny and project our guilt, and, unbeknownst to us, maintain it. They also serve as a mask to hide from us the fourth obstacle.
They could be summarised as:
1 attack all else,
2 attack oneself, and
3 accept the ultimate cost of attack: Death.
The fourth obstacle, hidden by the first three, but there to confront us should we see past them, is our fear of God.
In this article we shall consider the first two obstacles.
The obstacles that we have erected to our awareness of truth are any substitutes we have made for Love. The Course teaches that the primary expression, or context for, these obstacles, is to be found in special relationships. All relationships are special, and will remain so until we see them for what they are through our invitation to the Holy Spirit. They can then be transformed into something radically different. In the course of this transformation we are not asked to deny or reject the specialness we have made. Rather, all that we made can serve salvation as easily as specialness. This is in fact our special function. [See T-25.VI]
The obstacles to peace which we encounter either come from us or seem to come from outside. In the latter case we have merely denied our responsibility for what we see and therefore have an investment in seeing the problem outside of us. Finally we must come to the realisation that each and every obstacle to peace is one we have imposed on our reality, and our only function is to let them be removed. [See W-pI.189.8:3]
The Holy Spirit’s guarantee is that peace will flow across all obstacles as they yield to the Truth. The outcome is certain because it has already been accomplished. It awaits only on our acceptance for our awareness of its accomplishment. We need to remember the Course’s basic metaphysical teaching that the Answer was given the moment the Son thought of separation. In that moment it was completely undone. That is the Atonement principle — accepting that we have done nothing to be guilty for and that our seeming errors have been without substance or effect.
From inviting the Holy Spirit into relationships we learn to increasingly turn to Him, for nothing we see “outside” ourselves can be trusted. [T-19.IV.2:4]
Although we cannot see the Holy Spirit, we can, and must, begin to see our brothers truly. In that seeing is the Holy Spirit revealed. We cannot find Him alone, because that is not where He is. He is to be found only in true relationship, or joining. [See T-8.III.5:7-8]
Our invitation to the Holy Spirit established a temple to the Father. This temple is our relationship to Him. In seeing our brothers truly, we have invited them into this temple, to rest and be refreshed, and share in His love.
The First Obstacle to Peace:
The desire to get rid of it.
The Course teaches that peace is within us because it is a reflection of the Truth of what we are as God created us.
In our desire to hold onto our ego state, the false identity we have made for ourselves, we feel compelled to get rid of peace. To the ego peace is a threat, for peace and guilt cannot coexist and the ego is the belief in guilt. By holding on to guilt (fear or attack) we are thus denying or blocking our awareness of peace and thus its extension. Peace will only be known to us by our extension of it. This is another way of stating the basic Course teaching about the Law of Love. In giving, in this case peace, we actually seem to receive more of it because it increasingly grows in our awareness. When we abide in this state we are abiding in a state of abundance. [Recall the Lessons of the Holy Spirit.]
In rejecting peace, we are thus denying it to ourselves. Even the tiniest hint of anger or attack for a brother (or ourselves) seems to close Heaven to us. Yet it is but a senseless thought that we can let go. We are asked to turn to the light. Not to continue to look in the shadows but see them for what they are. Our habit is to look and stay in the darkness rather than come out into the light. We are immeshed in a tightly organised delusional system which, as Ken Wapnick points out in his workshop on these very obstacles, is a “full blown paranoid” system. A system of compensation that continually feeds back onto itself. The more fragile one feels “inside” the more desperate the need to control the “outside”.
Once again this is an example of projecting out what we want to hide from ourselves. The more secure and tightly controlled the outside world, the less fear we have that we will lose control. Yet as we are reminded often in the Course, defences do what they would defend. The tighter the external control the more fragile the inside seems to be! In accepting the Holy Spirit into our lives we have displaced our fear, our ego. It no longer has a stronghold within us. Always unstable, however, it still seems to take hold here and there. The very variability we sometimes feel in relation to things is an indication of our listening to the ego and its inconstancy. [See T-19.IV.A.8:6]
The attraction of guilt produces fear of Love. Guilt and love are mutually exclusive. The very presence of one denies the existence of the other. Attack is our way of projecting (and maintaining) guilt. Attack on any level produces fear and thus love cannot know or see fear, just as fear cannot know love. What we see, experience and perceive is a direct result of the “messengers” we choose to send out into the world, not what is actually out there. From fear and guilt we will see only evidence for fear and guilt, whereas love (the Holy Spirit) will see only love. Thus whenever you feel fear (or see the fearful) know that you can see differently. To look for love would mean that you would “see” only gentleness and peace, regardless of what is “actually” taking place. Even though we can believe in the existence of these two thought systems, love or fear, they cannot both exist at the same time. We can however split our mind and switch from one to the other, which produces conflict and confusion, which in turn serves only the ego.
Unless we are looking with the Holy Spirit we are looking with the “hungry dogs of fear”, perceiving a world of attack and murder. We are seeing the savageness of who we think we are. We are seeing it “outside” so as not to look at its source–ourself. We are seeing it outside so as to justify our own beliefs, and indeed the belief that there is an “outside”!.
Instead we are invited to send out “Love’s messengers”, no longer condemning or blaming our brothers (or the world itself) but instead extending the hand of forgiveness. This way all that we once rejected or condemned becomes an opportunity to forgive and thus accept salvation. Where we had been taught to fear love (for that would dispel guilt) we are now being assured that it is love that saves us and will release us from the guilt we feel (and which we had sought.) When you “send out” only love, fear is impossible. This is the only choice we really have, between Truth and illusion.
Jesus concludes his discussion here with a beautiful description of the feast love would set before us. Here he is poetically describing the feast offered by love as opposed to the scraps of fear and despair on offer from the ego. He also is providing us with a re-interpretation of the traditional meaning of communion. A joining of mind, not body. A reminder that salvation is a gift we already have, simply awaiting our acceptance, not a “prize” to be gleaned through the death of innocence. The body, the “temple” we have made to specialness, the division between what we believe to be the inside and the outside, the fence we think we have erected around ourselves, is an utterly meagre offering. One that he assures us he would not ask us to share. [T-19.IV.A.16]
The Second Obstacle:
the belief that the body is valuable for what it offers
The second obstacle that peace must flow across is the belief that the body is valuable for what it offers. What it is actually offering is the manifestation of the idea of separateness and individuality–the specialness of what we seem to be as individual beings. There are two main ways we play out this drama of specialness–first we make special hate objects upon which we take pleasure, either overtly or covertly, in venting the gamut of our negative emotions and, second, special love objects. The latter can be people, commodities and even ideas. By relating to these objects we seek the pleasure of getting what we secretly feel is lacking within ourselves–that special something to fill the void we necessarily created when we believed we split off from Truth and Love. When seen in this way, the Course’s question: “What has the body really given you that justifies your strange belief that in it lies salvation?”[T-19.IV.B.2:6], seems perfectly justified.
The downside of clinging to specialness, which the ego never makes explicit, is pain. Our desire for separateness and the belief we have actually manifested it, is the source of our guilt, the selfsame guilt we project and seek out in the first obstacle to peace. We cannot maintain the belief in the symbol of separateness (the body) and that it can offer us something which our relationship to God cannot, without guilt. Guilt always demands punishment and to face this guilt in ourselves is too fearful and painful. We will always, therefore, feel compelled to adopt the face of innocence. That is, we experience ourselves as being victimised by others, the past or projected future, circumstances and even our own bodies.
And of course, one who is victimised within the ego dynamic, is always justified in attacking back. It can be seen, therefore, that with the “pleasure” of specialness must necessarily come fear, anger, attack and defence. These states of mind feed and compound our original feeling of guilt and thus a viscous circle is created. We are reminded of the manual’s description of this state of affairs:
Into this hopeless and closed learning situation, which teaches nothing but despair and death, God sends His teachers.
M.Intro.4.7
The pain, however, does not stop there! Clinging to a “little mound of clay” [T-19.IV.B.4:8] as our home and identity leads to death because we have, in our awareness, traded the limitless for the limited; the eternal for what passes away. Therein lies the confusion that being saved must, by the nature of things, entail sacrifice and death. At one point, the Course asks “Do you prefer that you be right or happy?” [T-29.VII.1:9] The ego would prefer us to be right about our separateness and die to prove it rather than have us be happy and peaceful in our true, eternal relationship to the Father.
Not one but must regard the body as himself, without which he would die, and yet within which is his death equally inevitable.
T-19.IV.B.16:5
The Course says:
You have paid very dearly for your illusions, and nothing you have paid for brought you peace.
T-19.IV.B.5:1
In confronting this obstacle we are brought to the choice point of choosing the apparent pleasure and necessary pain of maintaining false self concepts or the peace and happiness of accepting our true condition and relationship to God. In the world of time that involves forgiving ourselves and our brothers for the idols we have made and allowing our special relationships to be transformed into holy relationships. The Course describes this as our true function and it also teaches that real pleasure can only come by fulfilling that function. Once again we see how the ego has deceived us–it never could offer us pleasure!
The Holy Spirit does not demand you sacrifice the hope of the body’s pleasure; it has no hope of pleasure.
T-19.IV.B.3:5
The good news is that in letting go the ego’s dynamics, we also release pain:
But neither can it (the body) bring you fear of pain. Pain is the only sacrifice” the Holy Spirit asks, and this He would remove.
T-19.IV.B.3:6-7
When we let go our false identification with the body, we naturally abide in our true nature as Spirit created by God. That is the only thing that is real, and that reality has never been touched by our apparent descent into separation. When we abide in that state, a state represented by our holy relationship, we abide in the solution or God’s Answer to the “tiny mad idea” of separation. As we have seen that answer was given and completely realised the instant the mad idea occurred, such that;
The tiny tick of time in which the first mistake was made, and all of them within that one mistake, held also the Correction for that one, and all of them that came within the first. And in that tiny instant time was gone, for that was all it ever was. What God gave answer to is answered and is gone.
T-26.V.3:5-7
It is on this basis that Jesus reassures us that all obstacles to peace will be surmounted because they already have been. It is only that we continue to use the symbols we have made to reinforce separation and guilt rather than to facilitate joining and forgiveness that makes it seem otherwise. But that too, is only a matter of time: [See T-19.IV.B.5:3-4 and T-19.IV.B.8:4-5]
To know peace we must extend it, but our awareness of it will be limited if we limit ourselves to the identity of a body. And to limit peace is, in a sense, not to know it because its very nature is unlimited.
We are being asked to place our faith only in the eternal because it is only the eternal that can join. It already is joined. The Course states this in several different ways.
Peace is extended from you only to the eternal, and it reaches out from the eternal in you. It flows across all else. T-19.IV.B.4:1-2
“From your Holy relationship truth proclaims the truth and love looks on itself.” T-19.IV.B.4.7:1
“Yet it (the eternal) can unite only with what is already at peace in you, immortal as itself.
T-19.IV.B.10:3
The body assumes its rightful place only when it is used as a means for attaining the condition of peace, a condition which allows love, and finally the rememberance of God, to return.
Recall the two miracle principles:
Miracles reawaken the awareness that the spirit, not the body, is the altar of truth. This is the recognition that leads to the healing power of the miracle.
T-1.I.20.
By recognizing spirit, miracles adjust the levels of perception and show them in proper alignment. This places spirit at the center, where it can communicate directly.
T-1.I.30.
Each instant our thoughts, perceptions and feelings reflect the truth of what we are as Spirit or express the fact that we have identified with the body and are asking of it what it cannot be–an end, rather than a means.
The body is the great seeming betrayer of faith. In it lies disillusionment and the seeds of faithlessness, but only if you ask of it what it cannot give.
T-19.IV.B.11:4-5
Herein lies the despair, disillusionment and anger which all of us have felt at some time. Yet Jesus gently re-assures us that in our false identification we have not sinned; we have only been mistaken. Rather than remain in despair about that which has failed our faith we are asked to put our faith where it belongs–in the eternal.
You have not sinned, but you have been mistaken in what is faithful. And the correction of your mistake will give you grounds for faith.
T-19.IV.B.11:8-9
If we persist in holding on to the body for what it seems to give us, we will continue to feel guilty and therefore fearful. Pain will appear to be our due. Clinging on to illusions is painful, and what appears to be pleasurable becomes hopelessly intermingled with pain. The core feeling of guilt which must attend choosing what we have made rather than what is given means, in effect, that we have chosen fear as our master. We will be compelled to send out the “hungry dogs” of fear in order to find guilt anywhere but in ourselves.[See T-19.IV.B.13:2-4]
The ego does not tell us that this attempt is futile–that in so far as we condemn others, we condemn ourselves.
Who would send messages of hatred and attack if he but understood he sends them to himself? Who would accuse, make guilty and condemn himself?
T-19.IV.B.14:11-12
Contained within the realisation that by attempting to hurt others it is only ourselves that we can hurt is the joyous alternative. By freeing others of our condemnation and judgement we simultaneously free ourselves. The sender and the receiver are the same; to give is to receive. In choosing peace as our goal we become the home and the temple of the Holy Spirit, who through us can give and receive the joyous message “the Son of God is innocent.” We can then learn that the twisted darkness of the ego and its effects are not true. They are in fact impossible.
For the Holy Spirit, too, is a communication medium, receiving from the Father and offering His messages unto the Son. Like the ego, the Holy Spirit is both the sender and the receiver. For what is sent through Him returns to Him, seeking itself along the way, and finding what it seeks.
T-19.IV.B.17:3-5
Linda & James Hale
Portions from A Course in Miracles Copyright © 1975, 1985, 1992 reprinted by permission of the Foundation for Inner Peace, Inc. The ideas represented herein are the personal interpretation of the authors and are not necessarily endorsed by the copyright holder.
The Obstacles To Peace, by Kenneth Wapnick, Foundation for “A Course in Miracles” New York, 1987 presents a detailed line by line analysis of these important sections.