ACIM
Manual For Teachers
What
Are the Levels of Teaching?
Level
1- Casual Encounter
The
simplest level of teaching appears to be quite superficial. It consists
of what seem to be very casual encounters...
a
"chance" meeting of two apparent strangers in an elevator,
a
child who is not looking where he is going running into an adult
"by chance," two
students who "happening" to walk home together.
These
are not chance encounters.
Each
of them has the potential for becoming a teaching-learning situation.
Perhaps
the seeming strangers in the elevator will smile to one another;
perhaps the man will not scold the child for bumping into him;
perhaps
the students will become friends.
Even
at the level of the most casual encounter it is possible for two
people to lose sight of separate interests, if only for a moment.
That
moment will be enough. Salvation has come.
It
is difficult to understand that levels of teaching the universal
course is a concept as meaningless in reality as is time. The illusion
of one permits the illusion of the other.
In
time, the teacher of God seems to begin to change his mind
about the world with the single decision, and then learns more and
more about the new direction as he teaches it.
We
have covered the illusion of time already, but the illusion of levels
of teaching seems to be something different. Perhaps the best way
to demonstrate that these levels cannot exist is simply to say that
any level of the teaching-learning situation is part of God's plan
for Atonement, and His plan can have no levels being a reflection
of His Will.
Salvation
is always ready and always there. God's teachers work at different
levels, but the result is always the same.
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