Kenneth Wapnick, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and one of the foremost teachers of A Course in Miracles, which he has been working with since 1973, when he joined Dr. Helen Schucman, scribe of the Course, and Dr. William Thetford at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. He has written more than 25 books on the Course, including Love Does Not Condemn, Absence from Felicity: The Story of Helen Schucman and Her Scribing of 'A Course in Miracles,' The Message of 'A Course in Miracles,' and many others. He has also produced over 150 audio and video titles discussing the principles of the Course. He is President and co-founder, with his wife Gloria, of the Foundation for A Course in Miracles in Temecula, California.
From pages 86-89:
This idea of judgment is extremely important. According to the Holy Spirit, again, there are only two judgments that we could ever make about anyone or anything in this world. It is either an expression of love or a call for love. There is no other alternative possible, which makes living in this world very simple once you think like this. If someone is expressing love to me, then how can I respond in any other way except to express love back? If a brother or sister of mine is calling for love, how can I react in any other way than to give that love? Again, it makes living in this world very simple. This means no matter what we do, no matter what the world seems to do to us, our response will always be one of love, which really makes everything very simple. As the Course says, "complexity is of the ego" (T-15.IV.6:2), whereas simplicity is of God. As we follow God's principles, everything we do will always be the same. The section at the end of Chapter 15 was written down at New Year's, and Jesus suggests a New Year's resolution to "make this year different by making it all the same" (T-15.XI.10:11). If you see that everything is either an expression of love or a call for love, then you will always react in the same way: with love.
Forgiveness is my looking beyond the darkness of your attack and seeing it instead as a call for light. That is the vision of Christ, and the goal of A Course in Miracles is to help us to meet every situation and person in our lives, without exception, with that vision. To make a single exception is really to say that there is some part of myself that I want to keep shrouded in the darkness of guilt and never have it freed by the light. The way that I will do that is to project it onto you and to see that spot of darkness in you. The final vision of the Course comes on the very last page of the text where it says that "not one spot of darkness still remains to hide the face of Christ from anyone" (T-31.VIII.12:5). Then all the darkness of the guilt in ourselves will be undone. Then we will see the face of Christ which, incidentally, is not the face of Jesus. The face of Christ is the face of innocence that we will see in everyone in the world. At that point we have attained the vision of Christ and that is what the Course refers to as the real world, which is the final goal before Heaven.
What this means in terms of how we live our lives is that we can see every single thing that occurs -- from the moment that we are born to the moment that we die, from the moment that we wake each day to the moment that we go to bed each night -- as an opportunity that the Holy Spirit can use to help us see ourselves as guiltless. The way that we look upon the people in our lives is the way that we look on ourselves. Therefore, those people who are the most difficult and the most problematic are the greatest gift to us because if we can heal our relationship with them, then what we are really doing is healing our relationship with God.
Every single problem that we see in someone else, that we wish to exclude from our own lives, is really the secret wish to exclude some part of our guilt from ourselves so that we do not have to let it go. That is the ego's attraction of guilt. The best way to hold on to our guilt is to hit someone else over the head. Whenever we are tempted to do that, the Course tells us that there is Someone with us Who will tap us on the shoulder and say: "My brother, choose again" (T-31.VIII.3:2). And the choice is always whether to forgive or not to forgive. The choice we make to forgive someone else is the same choice we make to forgive ourselves. There is no difference between inside and outside; everything is a projection of what we feel inside. If we feel guilt inside, then that is what we will project outside. If we feel the Love of God inside, then that is what we will extend outside. All people and all circumstances in our lives offer us the opportunity of seeing what is inside the projector of our own minds; they offer us the opportunity to make another choice. From pages 104-105:
Now let me talk a little bit about the role of God and the Holy Spirit in this. One of the important qualities of A Course in Miracles is that it is a religious book. It is not just a self-help book, or a sound psychological system which, of course, it is too. It is also a deeply religious book. Its religious aspects are centered on two points of view. The first is that without God we have nothing left but the ego. Unless we know that there is a God Who created us, Whose Son we are, we are stuck with whatever image or perception we have about ourselves which will always be some offshoot of the ego. True forgiveness is impossible unless it is first nourished in the belief that we are invulnerable. In other words, we cannot be harmed by anyone or anything in the world; such a belief is impossible unless we know that there is a God Who created us and Who loves us. So this is the foundation for the whole thought system that the Holy Spirit is offering us, as expressed by the Course.
The second part of the importance of God in all this is a little more practical. True forgiveness is impossible without the Holy Spirit. This is true from two points of view. First, we are not the ones who forgive; we are not the ones who undo guilt. Strictly speaking, when A Course in Miracles speaks of forgiveness, it is really speaking of the decision we make to let the Holy Spirit's forgiveness come through us. In and of ourselves we can never forgive, because in and of ourselves, at least in this world, we are the ego. We cannot change a thought system from within the thought system. We need help from outside the thought system -- help that enters into the thought system and then transforms it. That help from outside of the ego's thought system is the Holy Spirit. So He is the One Who forgives through us.
The second thing is even more important and will answer a number of questions that people have raised. Forgiveness is the most difficult thing in the world, which is why hardly anyone does it and why the whole concept of forgiveness that Jesus gave was so bitterly misunderstood from the time he gave it. The reason is that when we truly forgive, as the Course speaks of it, we are really letting go of our own guilt. And no one who identifies with the ego wants to do this. Without God's help there is no way that we can get through some of the deeper problems of guilt that will confront us.
