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SearchWhat are ACIM's views on sacred sexuality and romantic relationships?
Question:
Please could you share the understanding of ACIM's views on sacred sexuality and relationships of a romantic nature.
Answer:
A little more than nine chapters (15-24) in "A Course In Miracles" are devoted to releasing specialness, special love & hate relationships, and opening to the experience of holy relationship. Attraction to the body is the attraction to guilt. Enlightenment is a recognition of the Spirit beyond the body and the experience of Divine Innocence. The seeming Awakening "process" is an unlearning or undoing of the ego in which the mind is emptied of all specific concepts to make way for forgiveness (seeing the false as false). Miracle impulses are the Call to return Home to God, yet they become distorted in consciousness as appetites, fantasies, and "getting mechanisms" when they pass through the ego's filter of lack and need. Agape Love knows no need or lack. Romantic "love" springs from the attempt to find "love" in form. True joining opens communication and dissolves the filter, allowing miracle impulses to reach consciousness directly. Relationship is truly only a means for working miracles and extending Love and this Purpose shows the body as meaningless and reveals the Spirit as All.
Learning to give in the fullest sense will draw one out of the sense of having a separate will apart from God's Will. As long as one holds on to a self-concept one must want to get something outside of One Self, and must believe it is possible to do so. Your assignment with your partner, indeed with everyone you meet, is to learn how to give totally, completely, without distinctions or conditions of any kind.
Your partner is calling on the Sacred. Respect your partner's devotion to God, for it is yours. Listen carefully to the Spirit, for what your partner is asking for is what you are asking for. And what you give to your partner, you give to yourself.
This is what is meant by the path of devotion. In devoting yourself to one goal, forgiveness, you lose all sense of separate interests and separate selves. No request is too large or small in this Perspective. You can only join in this Perspective, the Perspective of the dreamer—never in the dream. Love does not oppose. There is nothing to fight, defend against, or be right about. And devotion requires trust, for trust in the Spirit dissolves all doubt.
At your current awareness, you perceive yourself as "in a situation." By learning to give without distinctions, you will learn to experience your Self beyond "situations,” as Everywhere and Everything! All that you need do is trust, step back, and do not interfere with an experience that will come of Its own accord. True Giving will reveal Itself to you and as You.
You will come to the realization that relationship is not personal. The only Real Relationship is Christ and the Creator God. It is not between persons, for thought-form associations deny the only Real Relationship. You cannot experience what True Relationship is until you have first realized the impossibility of the attempt to make past associations take the place of Reality. If the attempt is made to raise body thoughts to the level of mind (causation), and behavior is thought to be autonomous or independent of mind, you will not experience your Self as you are in True Relationship. Body thoughts are unreal effects, from an unreal "cause." Images do not relate to images, bodies do not relate to bodies, and persons do not relate to persons. There is no real relationship on the horizontal plane, for relationship and communication (communion) are in the Mind of God, and in that way are vertical. Our Reality and God are in eternal relationship and direct communication, or "communion."
All concepts of relationship must give way to forgiveness, seeing the false as false, and understanding that thought-forms cannot be meaningfully associated, ordered, or arranged. Time is simultaneous, not linear and sequential. Forgiveness does not attempt to change the past to compensate for a feeling of lack or guilt or inadequacy or incompletion. It sees the past as over and gone. By seeing that the image of the world cannot change, being all the same, the mind is freed from attempting the impossible and can recognize Itself as Changeless Mind!!! The awareness that illusions are one opens the Way for the Recognition that Mind is One! This is the realization that Love is All there Is!
Christ and God remain in an Eternal Relationship in the Mind of God. On earth relationships offer rich unlearning opportunities to release every grievance and every scrap of fear and guilt. True Union is the Christ Mind, and as all ego attempts to make a "union" in form are exposed and released the Memory of Union with God returns to full awareness. In Atonement all "individual relationships" have dissolved, and the Perspective of the Holy Spirit is all-inclusive. Nothing remains as private, possessive, or separate in the forgiven world. Healed perception sees the whole as whole.
I am joined with everyone in the Perspective of wholeness. Now earth reflects the Light of Heaven, and only dear, dear blessing remains. Glory to the One that is Love Eternal! Amen.
Love always,
David