Holding grievances is an attack on God's plan for salvation…
This is the thing, immediately, even perhaps while reading the lesson for today, the option to identify as a body or as mind is a present experience. Which is it? Am I mind? Or do I identify myself as ‘sitting on a chair, housed in a body, reading and contemplating with a brain. Here’s where “setting the goal at the onset,” as the Course, says, reveals itself as imperative, and obvious, to me. “What is salvation, Father? I do not know. Tell me, that I may understand.” Without this clarification by way of asking for it “Father what is salvation?… I want to know”, how can one trust the authenticity of the experience rendered? I have set the goal for TRUTH, it is the only purpose l have or want.
For truth to come I must meet its conditions… I need to be saved from the lie I now believe about who and what and where I am… so intrinsic within the goal of truth, is the goal of salvation… now, every seeming situation or person or thing must be the means for the accomplishment of the purpose set. Do I have faith in this?
Certainly, I have seen how having set a goal in this so-called physical world focused my mind to see and employ only that which could be used as a means for it’s accomplishment. So, I know how the program works. Where is my faith now?
For the longest time, as a student of the Course, I could not really comprehend the experience of “no-body”… Even when my desire to truly understand what was being given to experience through these daily lessons was relatively pure, as single-minded as I could comprehend anyway, I was also aware that I was sort of funneling the awareness for interpretation through a solid construct I identified as myself…
Yet, faith in the goal of truth was somehow the beacon of light I pursued… Gradually, I became more and more aware of the presence this limitation: the attempt to direct my learning and experiencing through this funneling through constructs. Although I lacked confidence in being able to move beyond it, my devotion increased. And, simultaneously, in glimpses, sometimes just teensy instances, a greater awareness essentially began to overcome me; glimpses of ‘no-body’, experienced as Mind-only.
These glimpses, these holy instances, strung together by my faith enfolded a new experience of every seeming situation and thing present in my life. Identification with body/body-mind began to slip and an essence of limitlessness commenced as the abode of my mind. Progressively, this mind-only identification has increased and become much more the ‘authenticity’ of my being and the 'reality' of my world than what once seemed an impenetrable construct of limited form…
The pure certainty present within these glimpses where no question exists, but only timelessness, formlessness, of changeless perfect peace, however fleeting these glimpses seem to be or how quickly I might discount and defend against them, enfolded the Self nonetheless. They hold the entirety of the whole in a holographic holy instant of recognition.
Let me be clear, these are not really tiny moments sandwiched in between other moments in time… Time itself is a concept supporting the belief in separation…. Something to consider, eh?
In Chapter 17 of the text, in the section titled “The Healed relationship”, Jesus talks about the tendency to discount and eventually dismiss the authenticity of our awareness of the experience of the holy instant. Here’s what it says:
"The experience of an instant, however compelling it may be, is easily forgotten if you allow time to close over it. It must be kept shining and gracious in your awareness of time, but not concealed within it. The instant remains. But where are you? To give thanks to your brother is to appreciate the holy instant, and thus enable its results to be accepted and shared. To attack your brother is not to lose the instant, but to make it powerless in its effects.
You
You and your brother stand together in the holy presence of truth itself. Here is the goal, together with you. Think you not the goal itself will gladly arrange the means for its accomplishment? It is just this same discrepancy between the purpose that has been accepted and the means as they stand now which seems to make you suffer, but which makes Heaven glad. If Heaven were outside you, you could not share in its gladness. Yet because it is within, the gladness, too, is yours. You
As you begin to recognize and accept the gifts you have so freely given to your brother, you will also accept the effects of the holy instant and use them to correct all your mistakes and free you from their results. And learning this, you will have also learned how to release all the Sonship, and offer it in gladness and thanksgiving to Him Who gave you your release, and Who would extend it through you.” (T-17.V.12-15)
So what happens that interferes with this limitless expansion? What brings forgetfulness to what is indisputably present in these glimpses? It is slipping back into once again identifying as a body amongst other bodies through the mechanism: judgment, in other words, holding grievances… and why? It is the authority problem inherent in and at the root of this dream we call the world. It is competition with God for authorship of life. Actually, any definition, I, myself place on anything, including what the Course is saying, is saying, “i know and God does not … I am the boss of my life.” It is a subtle attack on God’s plan for salvation… how sneaky the ego is, eh … and one is flipped right back again to: “I don’t know what anything means”, etc…
“What is this for?”, is the obvious initiation to every situation … then faith will handle the means of its accomplishment.
Thank you for joining with me in the One purpose, unified and sure… we are the salvation of the world through the One plan that can and will bring about its achievement… I want only to know my Father’s Will for me… We set this single goal together and together we are answered with salvation from the false and return to the TRUE ~I AM AS GOD CREATED ME…
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