Aug 1, 2026 · 1 hr 22 min · 10 segments
One ordinary morning, Leon Joel Russell opened A Course in Miracles and hit a single paragraph that stopped him cold for six days. This week Jennifer Hadley sits down with her fellow ACIM teacher to…
Leon Joel RussellGuest
Jennifer HadleyHost
And you were saying that you found something in chapter 10 in the very first paragraph of chapter 10 uh in section two which is the decision to forget that has been uh inspiring you and so let's let's talk about that because i i love to talk about the text and uh do you would you like to to uh read it out first and and then we can talk about it
Yeah, I think I'd just bring people up to speed a little bit, like I shared with yourself about how I discovered that I was reading the text again this year of a morning when I get up and I prepare my breakfast and my coffee and feed the animals and then I sit at the table, do some meditation and just set my mind up to listen, to be receptive, to allow... what's going to come to me to come to me rather than blocking up the airwaves with ego fm so i like to sort of set myself up at the table and then whatever i'm reading i'll i'll read a bit and i opened the course and um as i explained to you jennifer it was like In the last four or five years, alongside my love of the course, I've kind of brought a lot of other stuff to the table.
Probably because of YouTube and because of my work, I work as a tiler and I can do the job standing on my head now after 25 years.
Ends up, I've got eight hours a day that I can just put podcasts on and learn and learn and learn or unlearn, as we would say in course vernacular.
So, yeah, I mean, Rupert Spira, Francis Lucille, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Ramana Maharshi, Adyashanti, Michael Singer, Mooji, Papaji, all these other teachers, non-course teachers have been amazing.
finding their way into my day and I think as we said before we press record you know because the course is so beautiful and detailed and if you look at it in a metaphor of flavors there's so many notes to the in the flavor and some of these other non-dual systems can seem very clear very direct telling the same message but not as beautiful and flowery and poetic and picture painting And I realized as I started to read the text again that that must have started to have an effect because I was absolutely flying through the text.
Whereas historically I'd like maybe read a paragraph and then read it again and then read it again and then get to the end and then have to do the sentence again.
Because we know the course is set up like that so that we can't speed read it and we can't breeze
over it.
apply ourselves but I found that I was actually really getting it and reading it and not skipping and just flying through it until I got to as you described the decision to forget and that particular paragraph when I read it and my jaw dropped and I had one of those moments we've all had of like was this in here last time you know there's somebody coming in the night and stuck an extra page in my course and And that was it for about, it was literally six days.
Every morning I'd get up and I'd just go back to that paragraph and read it and then just think, what, this is outrageous, because this is strengthening the whole core thing of the Course, saying the separation never occurred, the Son of God is guiltless, these snapshot sentences that sum the whole thing up, there is no world.
And it kind of says to you, you know, you thought you were afraid of nothingness, but you were afraid of nothing.
If a child had a dream and their imagination presented something terrifying, it wasn't what appeared to be terrifying in the dream that was frightening.
It was actually the power of the mind to be able to imagine something terrifying and and to stop and consider that sequence.
So we are afraid of the power of our mind to generate our experience, to bring things into manifestation, as they say.
But Whether or not we're actually manifesting something like a car accident or a beautiful book or whatever we're manifesting, it's still part of the illusion.
And you were saying that you found something in chapter 10 in the very first paragraph of chapter 10 uh in section two which is the decision to forget that has been uh inspiring you and so let's let's talk about that because i i love to talk about the text and uh do you would you like to to uh read it out first and and then we can talk about it
Yeah, I think I'd just bring people up to speed a little bit, like I shared with yourself about how I discovered that I was reading the text again this year of a morning when I get up and I prepare my breakfast and my coffee and feed the animals and then I sit at the table, do some meditation and just set my mind up to listen, to be receptive, to allow... what's going to come to me to come to me rather than blocking up the airwaves with ego fm so i like to sort of set myself up at the table and then whatever i'm reading i'll i'll read a bit and i opened the course and um as i explained to you jennifer it was like In the last four or five years, alongside my love of the course, I've kind of brought a lot of other stuff to the table.
Probably because of YouTube and because of my work, I work as a tiler and I can do the job standing on my head now after 25 years.
Ends up, I've got eight hours a day that I can just put podcasts on and learn and learn and learn or unlearn, as we would say in course vernacular.
So, yeah, I mean, Rupert Spira, Francis Lucille, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Ramana Maharshi, Adyashanti, Michael Singer, Mooji, Papaji, all these other teachers, non-course teachers have been amazing.
finding their way into my day and I think as we said before we press record you know because the course is so beautiful and detailed and if you look at it in a metaphor of flavors there's so many notes to the in the flavor and some of these other non-dual systems can seem very clear very direct telling the same message but not as beautiful and flowery and poetic and picture painting And I realized as I started to read the text again that that must have started to have an effect because I was absolutely flying through the text.
Whereas historically I'd like maybe read a paragraph and then read it again and then read it again and then get to the end and then have to do the sentence again.
Because we know the course is set up like that so that we can't speed read it and we can't breeze
over it.
apply ourselves but I found that I was actually really getting it and reading it and not skipping and just flying through it until I got to as you described the decision to forget and that particular paragraph when I read it and my jaw dropped and I had one of those moments we've all had of like was this in here last time you know there's somebody coming in the night and stuck an extra page in my course and And that was it for about, it was literally six days.
Every morning I'd get up and I'd just go back to that paragraph and read it and then just think, what, this is outrageous, because this is strengthening the whole core thing of the Course, saying the separation never occurred, the Son of God is guiltless, these snapshot sentences that sum the whole thing up, there is no world.
And it kind of says to you, you know, you thought you were afraid of nothingness, but you were afraid of nothing.
If a child had a dream and their imagination presented something terrifying, it wasn't what appeared to be terrifying in the dream that was frightening.
It was actually the power of the mind to be able to imagine something terrifying and and to stop and consider that sequence.
So we are afraid of the power of our mind to generate our experience, to bring things into manifestation, as they say.
But Whether or not we're actually manifesting something like a car accident or a beautiful book or whatever we're manifesting, it's still part of the illusion.
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