Saturday, March 3, 2007

~Lesson 62~

Lesson 62:

Forgiveness is my function as the light of the world…
Forgiveness is the mechanism available to me to ‘teach only love’~ being all that I am…. It restores to me the memory of truth … It is my formula for happiness...
Really understanding what the course is talking about here with forgiveness, it seems to me, can only be learned by practice ~lots of it. A diligence and discipline worthy of God's Son and one I have given over to the Holy Spirit for my habitualization... It's working.
For me, at some point, I took the only step left, that was honest for me to take~ the ‘one’ leap of faith~ into letting ‘Only The Truth Is True’, be true ~s i g h~ and I ‘leaned back’ and began to rest in TRUST ~ in a willingness to be shown… I began to experience that my little willingness was not only enough, but enough because it is the only thing I have to give, honestly…
Trust shows that we are not alone, the answer is with us and within us and forgiveness demonstrates this by lighting the path in which to look past anything that is not in accord with everything… therefore restoring wholeness to my mind…
I cannot contain my gratitude for this holy gift ~for in it I SEE CHRIST! Forgiveness is the one formula of the Atonement principle, which is an act of love, given us by our creator, that when offered with the Holy Spirit, allows Love’s light to dawn.
I realize now, that forgiveness is the method for removing the barriers to loves awareness, that the course talks about, by allowing me to the see the belief in guilt, sin, and fear projected out and made into a “universe/ world/ family/ special-relationships/ personal so-called life”, as what it really is ~ FALSE~ therefore, a call for Love… And that is all…That is all!
~Then naturally, with no effort on my part, I become propelled forward, back into love’s presence… looking right past the ‘dreamed/drummed up situation'… to the irresistible call of Love. Forgiveness lets me “teach only love ~for that is what I am” … the meaning of the resurrection…alive in me…
To teach is to demonstrate. And when truth dawns light enlightening the mind ~ everything that ever seemed to be, fades into the shadowy backdrop of the function of forgiveness…
Only through forgiveness ~that’s forgiveness-for-salvation ~the term Jesus uses in the “Song of Prayer” supplement to the Course, do I demonstrate the Light of Christ. Here’s what it says:

“Forgiveness-for-salvation… it does not ask for proof of innocence, not pay of any kind. It does not argue, nor evaluate the errors that it wants to overlook. It does not offer gifts in treachery, nor promise freedom while it asks for death. Would God deceive you? He but asks for trust and willing ness to learn how to be free. He gives His Teacher to whoever asks, and seeks to understand the Will of God. His readiness to give lies far beyond your understanding and your simple grasp. Yet He has willed you learn the way to Him, and in His willing there is certainty.
You child of God, the gifts of God are yours, not by you plans but by His holy will. His Voice will teach you what forgiveness is, and how to give it as He will it be. Do not, then, seek to understand what is beyond you yet, but let it be a way to draw you up to where the eyes of Christ become the sight you choose. Give up all else, for there is nothing else. When someone calls for help in any form, He is the One to answer for you. All that you need do is to step back and not it interfere. Forgiveness-for-salvation is His task, and it is He Who will respond for you.”

I witness to this… It is my experience… Could any thing be more comforting? Peace is inevitable, I’ve noticed, without my interference… It was my interference that got me into this, where forgiveness is necessary, in the first place, wasn’t it? …The least I can do, and the most too, it turns out, is NOT TO INTERFERE.
He has called and I have chosen to listen… “Behold the greatest help that God ordained to be with you until you reach to Him. Illusion’s end will come with this. Unlike the timeless nature of its sister, prayer, forgiveness has an end. For it becomes unneeded when the rising up is done. Yet now it has a purpose beyond which you cannot go, nor have you need to go. Accomplish this and you have been redeemed. Accomplish this and you have been transformed. Accomplish this and you will save the world’…
What a profound occurrence of wakefulness this has been for me…. Thank you my brothers ~ There is no personal anything and without you I would be lost. Together we light the world through fulfilling our function of forgiveness…and Happiness is our happy return…I cannot go without you, for you are part of me

Friday, March 2, 2007

Lesson 61:

Lesson 61:


I am the light of the world…that is my only function… that is why I am here…

This is why it is so crucial to make choosing the Holy Spirit, which brings the awareness of light, the light within, the light that is my one Self, the most important thing, every day ~every moment ~this very instant! Being in touch with the light in you~ by placing my faith in the truth in you~ as my only goal ~lights my mind to the truth.
I see Christ everywhere in everyone… It is Who I am …and how I learn who I am in truth. If I don’t keep this at the forefront of my mind, at all times, how can I possible know what I am seeing and realize I look only upon Christ? That is why it is my only function. Without light I cannot see…light is within me where my Father placed and I know it comes from me when I shine forgiveness, without reservation, in every seeming place and time…
This is how I recognize that darkness cannot hide, nor with it, all the dark judgments and fears I held about you, the world, and myself.
I am the light of the world… I can remember the first time I did this lesson. I felt so unworthy and unfit for the seeming responsibility~ “God has built his plan for the salvation of his Son, on me…? I thought, “Oh, my god. That was so far from where I saw myself. What kind of miracle would it take for me to even get near to what this is saying?
Talk about arrogance…
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I didn’t love the idea of ‘being that guy – that save mankind guy’. As a matter of fact, I was always dummying-up a fantasy of saving the world and being the hero the god I made would be proud of … I just felt impotent ~l felt myself a failure as a child of God, weak and small and desperately needing a miracle… trying to save my face and my ass at the same time…~ It turns out, I was just wrong.
The miracle received for price of asking, turned out to be Christ; right here, right now…always, already, without distinction of any kind…
Absolutely humbling …

Humility: The return to the ground of my being in truth.

I chose again…offering the Holy Spirit within my mind my little willingness for all of it to be different than my made up, petty, arrogant story … That is the entire story, given over for a full reinterpretation by Him.
The miracle blesses me with the vision of a forgiven world, now. In it I am the light that shines away nothingness through forgiveness.
It’s weird how something so upside down and awful as, say, self-concept, (“the heavy chains that seem to bind them to despair”) can be shined away into the nothingness from which it came, leaving only the light that shined on it.
Chapter 18 of the text, in the section called “Light in the Dream” talks about the process of this return to light.

I am the light of the world~ that is my only function. That is why I am here. We light the world together, you and I, for we cannot be apart. WE ARE CHRIST! ~All glory to God and His plan for the salvation of His Son…

Thursday, March 1, 2007

~lesson 60~

Lesson 60:

~God is the love in which I forgive~ ~God is the strength in which I trust~ ~There is nothing to fear~ ~God’s voice speaks to me all through the day~ ~I am sustained by the love of God~
These are such a beautiful group of facts…or are they merely concepts in my mind? …t r u t h … hum… how does one be sure? First off, what we put our faith in we believe and by our belief we make real for us…whatever “it” is … (like a world of separate things apart, for instance)
Throughout my learning/unlearning experience with the Course, there was never a time its message didn’t speak to me of an ancient knowing so long yearned for. Much of my effort was misconstrued in interpretation often, yes, as it is for all minds that sleep. But my desire to know, although lacking in whole-heartedness at times, has never been more than a quiet moment’s reach away… and always available.
The appeal of the Course for me was more than just the extraordinarily intoxicating intellectual articulation of this powerful and exclusively new thought system; so complete and promising that the possibility of dumping the failure of my efforts of a so-called life into a whole system, and one, I was possibly on some level, already a part of~ for complete redemption and renewal ~compelling, to say the least… [now that’s what I call an extreme makeover], it was somehow simply a way to ‘pull-myself-together’.
What seemed to reach me, on a deeper level than I could ‘put-my-finger-on’, was an fundamental wisdom, a knowing something really t r u e.
I recognize this now as the “call for love” ~ All are called, few choose to listen… Not because we don’t want to… It is the structural dynamics of the of the ego thought system to deny, to specialize, to distract, label and rename ~to make ‘mine’…
It quickly became a transfixing obsession, for me, to conceptualize these ideas and attempt to fit them into the current belief structure, which I already had on board… Remarkably, of course I would then think I understood what it meant and try to construe my experience of ‘life’ to fit… having been compulsively drawn to give meaning where there is none and therefore, deny meaning where meaning is… and then give value to where I placed my meaning, not realizing it was insubstantial and really ‘nothing at all’. This left me, therefore, valuing nothing, thinking its something… damn… the merry-go-round… I’m sort of loosing perspective even as I write this ~its such a monkey-mind of upside-down concepts…how could one ever keep it straight? Is it possible? I think not!
Concepts are not real. They are the forms of separation designed to keep me from remembering the truth about what I am.
It was a long time coming for me, to understand this … I’m a smart girl, after all… yet, the light of understanding doesn't come to the 'figuring it out -thinks it already knows' mind ~ only to the mind emptied of concepts [however temporarily] ~the 'open-mind'.
It’s a funny thing~ the procedure; questioning every thing, every belief, and every idea ~
placing each on the alter for review … looking closely with the microscope of the Holy Spirit at the ready …~Here’s the funny part~ not one of them stands! Flimsy holograms at best…
I found that they were given dimension by the very avoidance of examination.
…Never underestimate the power of denial… ~words to live by…a phrase that has been in the background of my mind this morning. "I" can’t know …What is ~ is! And nothing else is! Period! “Only the truth is true and nothing else is true”...The only way to see the truth reflected here in this world is to look beyond effects to cause…And to look beyond, one has to look within and through…
I’m thinking about the section in the text called the “Happy Learner”. It’s talking about me.

I have not looked back …One cannot…when the miracle happens…and blesses everything and everyone. That becomes all there is to see!
In the end delay is futile, too…
The mind that is addicted to this world has not been trained to pay attention …that is the purpose of the addictive mechanism… which is the ego’s attempt to make the Son of God, mindless.
The miracle shows that ‘the world ~ my so-called life’ is, as the Course says, “an outside picture of an inward condition.” It then directs us back inward, first to the cause of the condition: the choice to align with the ego’s idea to ‘one-up’ God, where we see that impossibility. And then, in choosing the atonement, the Holy Spirit unveils First Cause: ~And nothing ever happened at all to interrupt the glorious song of gratitude for creation… Creations chorus of which we are equally a part … one voice ~ one Mind ~ the Mind we share with God, singing truly:

~God is the love in which I forgive~ ~God is the strength in which I trust~ ~There is nothing to fear~ ~God’s voice speaks to me all through the day~ ~I am sustained by the love of God~

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Lesson 59~

Lesson 59:

God is my Source~ the mind in which I think… the light in which I see with His gift of vision …His strength ~mine…God goes with me wherever I go… I cannot be apart from Him… I have no thoughts I do not share with God. I have no thoughts apart from Him, because I have no mind apart from His. As part of His Mind, my thoughts are His and His Thoughts are mine…

What if this is the template? What if I run today’s “to do-list’ through this criteria? Would it perhaps alter my experience?
… Just these types of questions I have asked again and again in different forms against similar proofs. Rhetorical questions really, driving me ever deeper within…deeper into the stillness of the living moment…into the peace that passeth understanding ~ the peace of God~ …
As I have given over to the devotion rendered by, and experienced through my relation ship with the Course in Miracles, its compelling message and direction has been virtually irresistible. Regardless of my wandering, seeking, escaping persona’s need to seek outside myself, even when the obvious ‘cha-chink’ took place the first read with the Course. As far as symbols go, the Course has been the perfect mirror for the Holy Spirit/Jesus/OneSelf ‘s undying devotion to me and for me; ~un believable compassionate love, acceptance and guidance…That reaction/interaction alone, made me question the validity of guilt. My entire experience with the Course and its irresistible definitive interaction with Spirit within, defied all my laws about worthiness, judgment, being right and smart and helpful and good…~or pay the price for the crime of ‘getting it wrong’, blowing it off, or whatever form the distraction might be in the forefront at the time…
The invariably compelling call to sink deeper, and deeper still…deeper into Now …NOW, is the holy instant of release and restoration I sought… and there it is…always…already present… I’m thinking about the part in chapter 15 which speaks to my experience here, now; ~with communication, with guilt, forgiveness and you, ~it says:

“It is through the holy instant that what seems impossible is accomplished, making it evident that it is not impossible. In the holy instant guilt holds no attraction, since communication has been restored. And guilt, whose only purpose is to disrupt communication, has no function here. Here there is no concealment, and no private thoughts. The willingness to communicate attracts communication to it, and overcomes loneliness completely. There is complete forgiveness here, for there is no desire to exclude anyone from your completion, in sudden recognition of the value of his part in it. In the protection of your wholeness, all are invited and made welcome. And you understand that your completion is God's, Whose only need is to have you be complete. For your completion makes you His in your awareness. And here it is that you experience yourself as you were created, and as you are.” (T-15.VII.14)
Ummmm …. beautiful! So yummy! So complete!
Awesome to pay attention…to sink into NOW…
When ever its not happening, when distraction’s got the best of me, I can’t really take it to seriously cuz… always…always… this feeling to turn the dial…ever so slightly… let go of being ‘me’ [an exhausting, disheartening job], and let spirit rip, comes over me… And sure enough, life being love, is always, already a flow…now, behind the scenes the strategic mind constructed… Everything I thought I was looking for is right within me, then beside, around, and as me.
Paying attention ~not to the surface ruckus of the undisciplined mind ~ [it jabbers on and on~ that’s what it does.] But rather, noticing the chatter just long enough to cop to my responsibility for it and look beyond it to what it’s trying to cover… and there, in that beyond and deeper still… there it is~ L O V E; always, already, all power and glory ~all of what I am in truth.
Honestly, right now as I write this, I don’t know how the forgetting mechanism works…right now I can’t remember anything but Love behind it all. Just now, I’m not in touch with what the shadows mean… (um, sweet peace…)
…Oh yeah, guilt, they mean guilt ~the guilt that believed the separation happened so had to hide itself in all these secret hiding places, these shadows made up to seem solid and real ~ where one could hide from a god made mad in a shadow called Danét … oh yeah…
Well, bring ‘em on… forgiveness lets me look at them while firmly grounded in GOD…ah yes…G O D…G O D I S M Y S O U R C E ~ . . . the mind in which I think the thoughts I think with God, the strength in which I accept His gift of vision, so that His light is also my light~ the light in which I see… from which, I cannot be apart so consequently, goes with me wherever I go, whatever I seem to do … it just happens really… whatever “it” is on the great “To- Do List” of life...
Ya know, somehow along the way I have become ‘free from “self-necessity”’ ~ a phrase, I stole from Kavenaugh, a great Irish poet, one I love and feel truly captures the essence of this experience of living I’m talking about. Life is and I am somehow it with you and all ~ one mind ~the mind we share with God…~forevernowalllove…~

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Seeing with holiness~ lesson 58

Lesson 58:

“My holiness envelops everything I see… blesses the world… There is nothing that holiness cannot do … holiness is salvation … blessed as the Son of God…”

What I am seeing is always what I’m looking with…

Some where along the way, I really began to realize that every where I looked, everything I saw; every tiny little thing that seemed to go on in my so-called life, was coming from me… even if I was reporting the situation as totally blind-siding me, -catching me completely off guard-, as I learned to be honest … I saw I put it there…

This kind of honesty is not for the faint-hearted, by the way. It requires “abundant willingness”, and one has to look dead-on, square-in-the-eye, then pick up and fondle some pretty ugly forms, beliefs, identities, ways of being, in order to see that they are all the same; merely a shadow of guilt.

~A shadow of guilt~ yes, ~yet, so unacceptable that projecting it as far away as possible and forgetting where it came from was apparently, the only viable solution at the time…

The return to honestly, through a just a little willingness to “have been wrong about-everything” feels good~ as excruciating as it is ~ it is good in a very ‘real’ sort of way; ~a way that says, “perhaps there is another way , after all…”

And, then it begins~… the obvious, bearable things first come to the surface…then with consistent willingness with deeper honestly raising and fondling of all the used, abused ideas; the demons once valued in fear such that one felt compelled not only to run from, but if necessary, bury alive rather than own, are raised up… [Incidentally ~dissolving at the very uncovering of then ~ {big, f@#!ing demons, eh?}]

Yet with this willingness, one begins to notice the inevitable awakening of the internal light. Right along side these fears and judgments, a light so unmistakable and compelling that one begins to feel its eternal presence had been present, all along. With also an awareness so profound that the very light illuminating all is but holiness itself, the holiness that is one’s Self…

The thing is, that for me, the recognition of my holiness, began to come through, when I first in placed some faith in the idea of the Holy Spirit… [Since I knew I had no faith in myself, at the time and could not be trusted]

The next step naturally followed… Through trusting that the Holy Spirit was with me and within me, gradually I began to recognize that ‘this was my holiness’ that the Course was talking about! It was like, duh, how could anything be separated out from anything?… So I came to see I was, by trusting the Holy Spirit within my mind, therefore, trusting my holiness, and truly valuing honesty… This leans into increased willingness, and trusting deeper, then into abundant willingness and a knowing that it is only my holiness I can trust and it NEVER fails me… There is nothing my holiness cannot do…

…Another world has developed before my very eyes… From my holiness does the perception of the real world come. My holiness blesses the world…

Having forgiven, guilt is replaced with faith. Faithlessness is healed along with guilt, being saved for me by holiness itself… In accepting my holiness, fear is replaced by love. The peace of God, my one goal, has become my constant companion… Certainty now sits where wishful thinking used to reside…There is no other way for me… how could it be any other way… I have seen/experienced the truth ~it is I~ and I am not afraid…I am blessed as a Son of God…Along with all my brothers, who are one with me… You are the light of Christ that makes it possible for me to see… I am eternally grateful!

Monday, February 26, 2007

I could see peace...

Lesson 57:

I have invented the world I see…
It took a while for me to understand that this isn’t a private statement made about and to a private mind called ‘Danét’, but rather, to the decision-maker part of the Son’s mind the Course is actually speaking to; this neutral territory which chooses to believe, place faith in, and identify with one of the two seemingly available thought systems. It is the part of the mind where ‘will’, as we experience it in this world, resides. There are two mutually exclusive thought systems from which two entire universes came forth and reside within the mind ~referenced by many names: Holy Spirit- ego, Heaven – hell, Love – fear, Knowledge – perception, Forgiveness/Oneness – separation, etc… These are, of course just labels that attempt to express experience... that alone, makes them a judgment of sorts…

It is only, when, for an instant we allow total dis-identification with these labels and their meaning~ where judgment is suspended [“the letting go of judgment is the obvious prerequisite for hearing the voice for God”], and willingness enters to take its place, that we can see the choice at all. And only from this neutral place can I learn anything… once a decision [whether I seem to be aware of making it or not] has been made, that system is exclusive, and holographic in nature…always looking upon itself… all other decisions, how and what I think, look upon, and all interpretations big and small are all the same and are determined by the road I chose to take...I am not the victim of the world I see… I am the decision-maker~ I decide. I am 100% responsible! Can this fact honestly be seen as victimizing? When all the power of the universe lies within my one choice? Honestly, can one really continue to be duped by this flimsy stance, once it has been seen at all? I think not! No, certainly not... There is another way of looking at the world…I could see peace instead of this… Is this really a difficult choice to make when what I choose has already been done…and L o v e: ~relentless and inevitable~ sits at the throne on the Alter placed within my mind by God himself? …
“The power of decision is my own and Heaven is a decision I must make” ~I am the Son of God; wholly present, to do my part in re-member-ing the mind that thought it spit. This re-member-ing of God’s Son, ~this choosing the Atonement for myself, ~this seeing the false as false and only the truth as True, ~thus forgiving all… this is my one goal…my purpose here.
WE ARE CHRIST… and we are NOT alone…ours is ONE-mind… that mind is part of God’s.

WE ARE VERY H O L Y!!! ~Happy choosing ~

Sunday, February 25, 2007

~God is in everything I see because God is in my mind~

Lesson 56:

“God is in everything I see because God is in my mind~

I am immersed now, finally, inevitably… in the certain experience that this (the Mind I share with God) is where reality is~ this is the only thing worth seeing or seeing with. It is the content that ‘Gives Life’ to anything, so it is the only real thing.

It is a level of true humility, grounding me so deeply in the truth of my inheritance and the always-ness of my being, that any other investment is fully a waste. Why give into temptations of personhood; pleasure, pain, goals, and disappointments? Why give way to ‘tomorrow being another day’ and sell- out to distraction?

God in my mind is the only thing real to see. As one becomes increasingly aware of this through experiencing its significance, one begins to understand how time is being used by the Holy Spirit to collapse intervals of time back in on itself into the eternal NOW, behind where time began … One begins to see what the Course means by delay and distraction and why all these tactics (which I often refer to fondly as my so-called life), although certainly meaningless in eternity, which, I see now, as I experience eternity, is untouched by the whole delay dance, yet the only dance time has to offer, is but deadly in time…

One begins to feel oneself the miracle and the living witness to how this goes down in the Correction/Atonement; substantiating through experience, the perfect expression of how the miracle works. Like it says in the very initiation to the Course, the section called The Meaning of Miracles, #13 and15: “Miracles are both beginnings and endings, and so they alter the temporal order. They are always affirmations of rebirth, which seem to go back but really go forward. They undo the past in the present, and thus release the future…. Each day should be devoted to miracles. The purpose of time is to enable you to learn how to use time constructively. It is thus a teaching devise and a means to an end. Time will cease when it is no longer useful in facilitating learning…”

Its obvious to me now that this is a measure of what ‘I think I am and I want my identity to be’…whether I want to be a) the author/victim of my world or b) see it as a classroom for recognizing my Home in God and the return to my senses…

I chose b on all counts! …

All these built-in teaching props for the Holy Spirit within my mind to give me a barometer of my status in relationship to Self/self… (Under His teaching every relationship becomes a lesson in Love. T. 291) This choice makes it so…God is in everything I see… Above all else I want to see differently ~differently than a world of apparent differences…Above all else I want to see the same eternal inheritance, everywhere, in everyone, and in everything. For if not, I am attacking the Whole of Life, which is invulnerable by its very nature in God. How futile is that? ~and, why ‘more than everything’ or ‘something other than’ or ‘separate from’ could never have happened in truth. This is why attack is dangerous in time… [My attack thoughts are attacking my invulnerability]…is meaningless and futile and, once again, just a distraction device to ‘real-ize’ my ego and therefore an attempt to delay the return of sanity and peace… which is, incidently, the inevitable outcome of ‘real-izing’ the truth.

It is a choice which way to look~ but to quote from that great guru THE MATRIX: “You’ve been down that road, Neo [O N E revisited], and you know where it leads…”

Together, we find ourselves at ‘The Branching of the Road’ that the course talks about in chapter 22 of the text. Please enjoy this warm invitation with me to take the ‘blue pill’:

IV. The Branching of the Road

In joyous gratitude I acknowledge my indebtedness to you, my brother, my One Self and our inheritance in God ~all Glory to God, forever and ever ~ amen