The ForgiveNest Podcast Transcript: ACIM | Moving Through the Circle of Fear - The Four Obstacles to Peace from A Course in Miracles, with Alison Anton
”You will not bruise yourself against them in traveling through. Let your Guide teach you of their unsubstantial nature as He leads you past them. For beneath them is a world of light whereon they cast no shadows." [ACIM CE T-18.VIII.9:1-3]
I'm Alison Anton. You're listening to the ForgiveNest Podcast for A Course in Miracles, your place to explore ACIM topics in healing, meditation, and your special function in forgiveness.
The passage I just read is from A Course in Miracles. Here, Jesus is talking about what he calls the "circle of fear”—which was set up by us, by the way, and we'll talk about how it was designed and installed by us in a bit—but it was set up purposefully to keep us from remembering the peace the Holy Spirit shares with us. This peace is us, and the Holy Spirit is here to show us that.
Jesus describes four distinct layers, or obstacles as he calls them, that block us from our light. Every time we take a step toward ourselves as light, we inevitably hit these layers or blocks. The very last thing we want to do is go through them when we sense them. We want to move away. We move away from them anytime we get the inkling there's more to us—specifically, more to us as a brotherhood—that our mind is one with everyone in our lives and not separate.
When the ego starts to sense the real presence of an undivided self (our true nature) whether this sense is conscious or unconscious, it backs away, sometimes slowly, and sometimes quite abruptly.
We actually sense these obstacles no matter what; no matter how far we keep ourselves away from them. In other words, no matter how engrossed or distracted in our physical lives we are, we still sense these. These obstacles are what keep us in our lives.
A Course in Miracles calls our physical life a dream that our dreaming mind doesn't want us to wake up from. The blocks were put there by this dreaming mind to specifically keep us from waking up. It's hard to believe, but we put these there. The design of this is truly epic and requires a much deeper dive than just this one episode. The realm of the ego is a lot bigger than just this world we're on right now.
I love this topic and I will absolutely do more posting on it. Very likely an entire program, but let's keep going here in the meantime…
These blocks manifest as the cycles we're constantly going through here. The cycle of relationship challenges and the cycle of life and death, and life and death again… and again… and again.
It's kind of like a perpetual wash, rinse and repeat cycle. We can't get through the blocks, and so we just keep thinking the blocks define our reality. They don't, and that's why I began this episode with the particular passage I read.
I'll read it here again:
"You will not bruise yourself against them [the obstacles] in traveling through. Let your Guide teach you of their unsubstantial nature as he leads you past them, for beneath them is a world of light, whereon they cast no shadows."
And if it were that easy! And it is, but we have some considerable deprogramming of our minds to do to pass through these. And that's what the Course is for.
Jesus says the obstacles to peace particularly become noticeable when we start moving toward them consciously or purposefully, like we do when we follow the practices in the Course and accept the Holy Spirit as our Teacher and Guide. He's specifically telling us you will bump into this, and when you do, follow the teachings I've laid out in this Course.
He also indicates that we have the distinct opportunity to traverse these walls in partnership. Partnership here is referred to as the holy relationship; any relationship we've called the Holy Spirit in as our Teacher and Guide to transform the relationship. Ultimately, this is our partnership with the entire brotherhood; with everyone.
It's clear that Jesus is getting us to understand that it's impossible to actually do this path alone. It's impossible because we are a unit. The Holy Spirit's way of making that a part of the curriculum here in bodies is by using the holy relationship as the content for the curriculum.
Okay, now in order to really start to think about the circle of fear and the obstacles to peace, we need to unpack a few things, obviously.
For one, there's the question of why do these rings of fear surround our light? Why are we blocking ourselves from ourselves? I'll talk about that.
And then there's the question of what are these four distinct obstacles Jesus says we fear so much? I’ll describe each of those briefly.
And then, of course, how do we get through them?
I'm going to take these three questions and go backwards, starting with the last one first. This is a perfectly fitting thing to do in honor of Jesus's famous biblical quote: "The first shall be the last and the last the first." It's fitting because this is what he was talking about. The first to go through will also be the last.
Why? Because we're a brotherhood. The first will never leave the last behind, and no one will ever go alone. We walk each other through. Jesus says, "For in your new relationship am I made welcome, and where I am made welcome, there I am." [ACIM CE T-19.IV.A.18:4-5]
Everything we do is for all of us. In this miraculous walking back through the fear process, we leave our light along the way, which shines the path for all others that follow.
I call it light anchoring. We leave cairns of light that trail a safe path through. As more and more of us do this, the path of light becomes brighter, lighter, and easier for those to come and for us as we go through again. And again, and again. Remember, "the first is the last".
Okay, last question first:
How do we get through these incredibly debilitating, to say the least, obstacles to peace?
Jesus has us learn to get through the obstacles using his practice curriculum. This is the workbook from A Course in Miracles. I would also include the manual for teachers here too, and obviously the text gives us tons of insight on this as well.
But the Course workbook is, in my opinion, our starting point, our middle point, and our end point. The lessons in the Course implement, as I like to call them, the daily ego deaths. And this is a good thing—We become willing more and more to let go of the ego's construct and turn our vision over to the Holy Spirit, who shows us an entirely different construct.
The daily deaths, or the mini traverses through the obstacles, show up in many, many forms. They show up as we practice the main tenets of the course, which are (in my own wording here):
1: we must learn to recognize we're in a dream that we made up.
2: we must practice forgiveness of ourselves and others because we're in a dream we made up.
And 3: we must will to establish communication with the Holy Spirit, who is the help in undoing this dream.
He and Jesus are also our Guides that walk us backward through time, through the dream, through the circle of fear, and all the way back home to the light. Systematically learning to change who our Teacher is, choosing the Holy Spirit over ego, becomes an ever increasing threat to the ego.
As we practice daily—every hour we strengthen that partnership becomes a mini death for the ego. We chip away at the walls the more we become familiar with what they look like. One day we'll see they're merely dust. Not actually because we chipped away at them, but because they actually never were anything more than dust. So chipping away here is more like the chipping away at our perception that sees things incorrectly.
Okay, second question: What are the four blocks within the circle of fear that we have to get through?
Well, the first obstacle or the outermost ring as I see it, is pretty much the desire not to desire the Holy Spirit as the guide in all of our relationships. It's the desire not to be in peace or live in peace with others.
Now it's funny because we all think that’s all we want, right? But if it's really what we want, why do we have a hard time pretty much with everyone we know? Even the people we love the most can be very challenging for us a lot of the time. We think it's because they have characteristics that are unbecoming, but it's simply this very particular block that keeps us from seeing that we are projecting that unbecomingness onto them.
This is the block. And this is why forgiveness is such a huge focus in the Course curriculum. Being 100% peaceful, 100% of the time to 100% of the brotherhood is a requirement, frankly.
This seems so impossible to us, but Jesus is constantly reminding us that peace is what we are. Being anything other than peace is actually what's impossible.
So as we move in from the outer ring, the second obstacle we hit is essentially that we want the body to be who we are. We want to believe our self made construct—our bodies, our history, our religions, our boundaries, our hurts and our accomplishments, all of our life experiences and even the world and the cosmos we see—we want this to be who we are, and that we're nothing else beyond this.
We think this deserves saving, and we'll fight tooth and nail to keep it. The ego will do almost anything to keep this construct intact when it's threatened, including destructive things to our brothers and sisters.
The third obstacle is death itself, notably the attraction of death. Jesus says death is actually a choice we make. He calls it a “devotion"; a dedication to madness that we ourselves set against the peace of Heaven. It's an epic and deliberate, mind you, undertaking by the ego to preserve that self construct we talked about. Death for sure is part of this very self construct.
Our attraction to death keeps us in it. It's like a pump that keeps priming itself, but instead of stepping up to the wall of death while we're alive to actually observe it, very few people come anywhere close to that. It takes tremendous practice to lean into this particular fear and simply just look at it.
Tibetan Buddhists, I'll say, are well known for including death work or bardo training in their curriculum. They're extraordinarily well versed in looking at the death machine, as I call it, and the spaces between lives. But still, very few people get past this wall.
And the last and final wall is the fear of God.
This one is so far deep and back in our subconscious mind, it's almost impossible to grasp the absolute enormity of it, until we're looking right at it. This wall is the darkest one, the most grotesque one, and brings up extreme terror, purposefully. We never dare come anywhere near it, until of course, the very moment we accept the atonement, or true healing for ourselves, and are able to look squarely at this seemingly rock solid and impenetrable layer.
I see it as the very object that signifies the stamping into time of the separation. The dream started here. It's where we decided we wanted to be apart from Creation instead of with Creation. The biblical teachings on a vengeful, angry God arise from this obstacle. We placed the fear of our Creator here at the very entrance to the peaceful universe He created; the peaceful universe we belong in ourselves.
Why did we do this? Because the ego knows it will be laid aside the very moment we look beyond it. It knows its existence was never real. Jesus says in that very moment we see an extraordinary love, and immediately remember Who our one and only true devotion is for.
Our Creator, and the real joyful world He created is our home. We want to be there, and that moment we decide for it, the ego is laid down, as well as all the constructs that went with it.
And that, my friends, is why the ego will fight till the very end to keep us from home. That's why our mind installed these barricades.
The circle of fear is like an epic version of the sleep button on our alarm clocks. Part of ourselves wanted the dream to be real, so we blocked ourselves from waking up. But eventually, we all have to get up, and we all know this within ourselves.
So in a little nutshell, I answered our final question too, why did we put these walls in place? Short answer? To keep ourselves asleep.
We're still in our infancy with our wake up process, and we have a way to go in learning that fear has no power over us. But we have been given the tools. We have the means, the Guides, and the way to practice this lifetime.
I'm going to leave you here with a few lines from the intro of A Course in Miracles to sum this all up. Jesus says:
"The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love's presence, which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all encompassing can have no opposite." [ACIM CE In.1:5-8]
And I'll leave you with that to ponder.
Thanks for joining me on the ForgiveNest Podcast.
I'm Alison Anton. It was great talking to you.
