ACIM Manual For Teachers

Who Are Their Pupils?

In order to understand the teaching-learning plan of salvation, it is necessary to grasp the concept of time which the course sets forth.

Atonement corrects illusions, not the truth. Therefore it corrects what never was.

Further, the plan for this correction was established and completed simultaneously, for the Will of God is entirely apart from time. So is all reality, being of Him.

The instant the idea of separation (from God) entered the mind of God's Son, in that same instant was God's Answer given.

In time this happened very long ago. In reality it never happened at all.

 

The world of time is the world of illlusion. What happened long ago seems to be happening now. Choices made long since appear to be open, yet to be made.

What has been learned and understood and long ago passed by is looked upon as a new thought, a fresh idea, a different approach.

Because your will is free, you can accept what has already happened at any time you choose, and only then will you realize that it was always there.

As the course emphasizes...

you are not free to choose the curriculum, or even the form in which you will learn it.

You are free, however, to decide when you want to learn it. And as you accept it, it is already learned.

Time really, then, goes backward to an instant so ancient that it is beyond all memory and past even the possibility of remembering.

Yet because it is an instant that is relived again and again and still again, it seems to be now.

And thus it is that pupil and teacher seem to come together in the present, finding each other as if they had not met before.

The pupil comes at the right time to the right place. This is inevitable because he made the right choice in that ancient instant which he now relives.

So has the teacher, too, made an inevitable choice out of an ancient past.

God's Will in everything but seems to take time in the working-out. What could delay the Power of eternity?