Final Lessons

Welcome to the final five lessons of A Course in Miracles Workbook for Students.

As we wind down our first year of Gentle Healing, we prepare for our second year. The final lesson, which will be with you for five days, is the perfect beginning of Year 2. As we go into the second year of Gentle Healing, we go into a year that has three primary focuses:

1. Coming to know and follow your individual inner teacher.
2. Purifying false beliefs and unwholesome conditioning.
3. Becoming increasingly familiar with awareness as your Self.

The final lesson, which is repeated for five days, is a lesson of surrender and trust. Surrender and trust are the very skills needed to accomplish the objectives for Year 2. Therefore, I encourage you to spend the next five days immersing yourself in the final lesson. I recommend taking breaks to read it slowly and contemplatively several times a day. If you feel to, you can also write based on a phrase, sentence or excerpt from the lesson that you feel particularly attracted to. Writing will allow you to go into the heart of the lesson more deeply. If you happen to write on all five days, you may experience a deepening each and every day.

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Before going to our final lessons, let’s review the special themes:

What is Forgiveness? Forgiveness is recognizing yourself as the unaffected Self. Therefore, “what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred.”

What is Salvation? Salvation is healing by “failing to support the world of dreams … it lets illusions go. By not supporting them, it merely lets them quietly go down to dust.”

What is the World? It is a “false perception” where “mechanisms of illusion … go to find what has been given them to seek.” Yet, “all perception can be given a new purpose.”

What is Sin? Sin is ignorance or outward focus. “Sin is the home of all illusions, which but stand for things imagined issuing from thoughts that are untrue.”

What is the Body? “The body is a fence” that seems to separate us from everything else. It makes duality seem real and makes it seem as if we experience duality directly. However, its purpose can be changed.

What is Christ? Christ is consciousness. It is the process of creation and the unaffected witness of creation. It is what we are. It is our higher Self. (Note: There is a more ultimate reality beyond Christ, compared to which Christ is an illusion.)

What is the Holy Spirit? The Holy Spirit is a Judeo-Christian term for spiritual intuition, which issues forth from our Self as consciousness. Its sole purpose is to help us awaken to consciousness. Once this goal is accomplished, its purpose is done. (God takes the last step to awaken us beyond consciousness.)

What is the Real World? The real world is the world as it is seen from the perspective of consciousness. It is a world blessed by forgiven eyes, seen through true perception. The real world is still a dream, but it is a dream that reflects Truth. It prepares us for the next and final awakening.

What is the Second Coming? It is the first awakening, awakening to our Self as consciousness. From this awakening we see with true perception and experience the real world.

What is the Last Judgment? It is the second and final awakening, awakening beyond consciousness into Nirvana. With this step, consciousness itself is seen to be untrue.

What is Creation? “Creation” is a term A Course in Miracles uses for eternal reality. It is known after the death of our sense of self as mind-consciousness. It is our true Self beyond any sense of self. It is our actual existence.

What is the Ego? It is the sense of self. The lower ego is the self-centered self, sometimes called the lower self. Usually when people use the term “ego,” they are referring to the lower self. However, the higher Self or “I am presence” is also part of the ego sense of self. The lower self is separation consciousness, and the higher Self is unity consciousness. Both the lower and higher selves are transcended when the final awakening occurs.

What is a Miracle? Miracles are shifts in perception that move one from the lower self to the higher Self. Some people refer to these shifts as awakenings, although each shift is a subset of the total awakening experience. Awakening to consciousness (the higher Self) may be gradual or sudden and varies greatly among individuals.

What am I? The answer to this question can be known as a direct experience when the sense of self disappears completely.

Peace be to me, the holy Son of God. Peace to my brother, who is one with me. Let all the world be blessed with peace through us.

Please read today’s workbook lesson in full. Notice a phrase, sentence or excerpt that you feel particularly attracted to and go into it more deeply through writing.

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What Am I?

Although our final special theme did not directly answer the question, “What am I?” it has given us some final thoughts to contemplate before A Course in Miracles Workbook for Students comes to an end.

We were given these words to contemplate as pointers to what we are:

• Complete and healed and whole
• Guaranteed eternal life
• Love perfected, fear impossible, and joy established without opposite
• The holy home of God Himself
• Sinlessness Itself
• Purity

We were also told:

The truth of what we are is not for words to speak of nor describe. Yet we can realize our function here, and words can speak of this and teach it, too, if we exemplify the words in us. …

And thus our minds are changed about the aim for which we came, and which we seek to serve.

As the workbook nears its end, we are left with a decision to make. Do we want to practice our function here to the best of our ability so we can prepare ourselves for the final awakening, which is the realization that answers the question, “What am I?”

How committed are we to discovering the answer to the workbook’s final question?

God’s answer is some form of peace. All pain is healed; all misery replaced with joy. All prison doors are opened. And all sin is understood as merely a mistake.

Please read today’s workbook lesson in full. Notice a phrase, sentence or excerpt that you feel particularly attracted to and go into it more deeply through writing.

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What Am I?

Our special theme says, “We bring glad tidings to the Son of God, who thought he suffered. Now is he redeemed. And as he sees the gate of Heaven stand open before him, he will enter in and disappear into the Heart of God.”

Our special theme began with the question, “What am I?” and ended with, “disappear into the Heart of God.” In between that beginning and ending, although we were given words to contemplate, we were not given an answer to the question, “What am I?” That answer comes best in those last few words, “disappear into the Heart of God,” especially in the word “disappear.”

I’d like to share something that was written by Floyd Henderson, a student of Nisargadatta Maharaj. In his book, The Final Understanding, Floyd wrote:

Thus, the invitation is (to those ready, and only for those ready) to receive the final understanding…

Go back—follow the trail in order to trace what you think yourself to be. Move back from (8) the conception to (7) a sperm set into motion to spontaneously seek an egg to (6) an act of friction to (5) plant food cells being transformed into sperm and egg cells to (4) plant food being prepared and eaten to (3) plant food being acquired to (2) plants growing to (1) the elements.

Where in that chain—which can be traced back and can be seen to have been repeated for trillions upon trillions of times for millions upon millions of years on this planet—could you possibly claim the existence of any “you-ness” or “You-ness”?

Who would want to make such a claim? Only one motivated by arrogance, … Only one so trapped in one or more ego-states and in so much egotism that one would want to trace his or her lineage back to some “famous, big name people” and beyond that to “God” or “a god” or “a goddess” or some “Supreme Self.”

It may take time for some of you to contemplate the significance of what Floyd points to in this excerpt. It was more quickly apparent to me, because my dad pointed to this on a hike with me in Southern Missouri about 25 years ago, and I have had ample time to contemplate it since then.

I asked my dad what his spiritual beliefs were. My dad has never been a religious man, so I had no idea what he thought when it came to spirituality. He told me that one day he would die and be buried in the ground; his body would turn to dirt and mix with the soil; plants would grow in that soil; birds and animals would eat the plants, and then they would die and mix with the soil, so on. In that way he would live forever.

My dad was communicating truth. He is not my dad. He is not his body, his personality or his mind. He is not his sense of being human. He is not even the sense of “I am.” He is life, which continues as forms come and go. There is no “me” in life. There is no “you” either. And that is the answer to the question, “What am I?”

Each of us needs to come to this answer through our own unique, genuine awakening process. Therefore, the best our special theme could do to answer the question, “What am I?” is give us this word:

Disappear

When “me” disappears—when even the “I am” of consciousness disappears—then and only then is the answer to, “What am I?” known.

No call to God can be unheard nor left Unanswered. And of this I can be sure; His answer is the one I really want.

Please read today’s workbook lesson in full. Notice a phrase, sentence or excerpt that you feel particularly attracted to and go into it more deeply through writing.

Meditation Options

Guided Meditation Audios

YouTube Meditation Playlist