Saturday, May 19, 2007

Lesson 140:

Only salvation can be said to cure…

To get off the merry-go-round of thinking in personal terms around the subject of healing, is very difficult indeed, as long as we believe we’re here. Without personhood, this world would not exist.

Usually when we’re addressing healing, it is because there is something about what’s happening in our lives, with our bodies, that we don’t want. So it seems as if this is a problem that needs a physical solution.

A crucial shift for me was finally, firmly grounding myself my essence; in the essence that I am as God created me, which revealed plainly that what is inconsistent with eternal peace and joy, cannot be real. This in turn, allows for the remembering of the simple.

There is only one problem. That problem is that we believe that we could be something other than what God created, authorizing us to be separate from our Source.

There is only one solution. Salvation. The truth is true and only the truth is true. Salvation is the flip-side of the false world of problems, aliments and disappointments. The truth collapses all falsehood in on itself when it is brought together. It answers any seeming problem as merely a case of mistaken identity.

Any aliment brings the message that I have forgotten what I am, in truth. It is only in seeing this error that one can accept the cure. Once this misalignment is identified, one can now easily establish that a confused state has occurred, therefore one’s judgment is impaired. The mistake of having taken life to be personal and separate from the whole, where real identity lies is revealed, along with the remedy. Beyond the source of my confused state, is the cure unveiled. We are as God created.

We forgive what cannot possible be real in truth, and wait… This waiting piece has been a touchtone for the evaluation of my sincerity for healing. As long as I am looking for a solution to make myself ‘more comfortable’, I am trapped in a personal premise. There is no ‘personal’ premise in the mind of God’s Son… Duh! It finally occurred that healing can never occur as long as I see differences, as long as there is you and me and God, as separate ideas on any level.

I have to want only the truth to be true ~there are no variables, and no compromise is possible. You are healed along with me, and I with you. We are one mind. And it is this one-mind that needs healing. My contribution is invaluable. Wholeness means whole not part. So rather than seek to feel better now, I see that how I feel now, is relevant only as far as it can be forgiven as false and brought back in to the whole of mind.

One cannot be healed alone~ aloneness is the definition of sickness. The purpose for certain specific problems showing up in my world reflect my state of mind where healing is taking place. There is no ‘cold’ or broken bone, or divorce or death of loved one. At all.

There is only love and the holy call for love to the sleeping mind. It’s so obvious. The false is false. Period.

No amount of belief in it or its remedies can morph nothing into something. God gave the Atonement, in answer to this belief of ours. Hence, we have the Holy Spirit continuity of whole-mind. Here we have the ever-present memory of truth, as available to us as we are willing to bring all illusions including beliefs and feelings and submit them to the test of truth. They have already been judged as nothing in the mind of the Son that has gone on unhampered by the fantasy of separation, and when we willingly bring our dreams of death, to the light of truth, healing feels like laughter…

Deep joy and well being, replace fear and insecurity, as the silliness of the false is revealed. A smile one can’t repress, a beaming from within that all is well, takes the place of the seriousness, which crystallizes problems and illness in this world…

There is nothing serious, here… because, seriously, there’s nothing here… God’s plan for salvation is the only cure… aliments are not of God and once seen as simply a mistake in identity, are overcome by the rich peace and surety intrinsic in accepting the Atonement ~the Cure…

Friday, May 18, 2007

Lesson 139:

I will accept Atonement for myself…

I am as God created me… and I remain as I am as God created me. I could have no other reality or life… This is the truth that we denied… only this. Do I want to see what I denied? Do I want to see what I denied, because it is the truth? This is it. Simply ~I am as God created me~ This is truth.

The ego analyzes, the Holy Spirit accepts. For me the compulsive urge to ‘figure it out’ has been a major ingredient of what I fondly refer to as my so-called life. ~It’s one of those ‘positive’ addictions, by the world’s standards, like exercise. In my case, it was a full-blown addiction, which demanded constant satisfaction (never achieved). ~‘If I could just figure out what was going on and why, I could feel better” …

This requires keeping ones world in quite a small perspective in order to control the number of variables that must be considered. And once the ‘peak‘is reached, its term is gravely temporary…. engaging once again the compulsion to figure-out… (One could make a career out of it).

It turns out to be simply a distraction device: employed by the ego, accepted by the willing mind of one who temporarily wanted it play the role that death metes out instead of recognizing where all life must be and of course there I must be also… Until… it doesn’t…

When I no longer wanted to play the role of ‘not knowing who I was’, when I truly wanted to see the truth about myself that I denied, not having any designs on what that might mean, I came to Creator, to my Self~ to what turns out to be ‘Atonement’~ I came with open mind and empty hands, expecting only truth, …

And there it was, in the last place I would have looked~ within my Self; all of all I Am. I saw that I had been with me all the time, and so had you… Nothing in this world has ever looked quite the same again. Some things are just too plain to see if we’re not sure we want to see and impossible to not see once the decision has been made… Acceptance of the Atonement has this effect…

From moment to moment, day-to-day, I notice that whatever I seem to need to know to live my life, I seem to know… How much more certain can one get, in this world?

The simple logic of today’s lesson is clearly stated: “This does Atonement teach, and demonstrates the Oneness of God's Son is unassailed by his belief he knows not what he is…. Here is the end of choice. For here we come to a decision to accept ourselves as God created us. And what is choice except uncertainty of what we are? There is no doubt that is not rooted here. There is no question but reflects this one. There is no conflict that does not entail the single, simple question, "What am I?"… Yet who could ask this question except one who has refused to recognize himself? Only refusal to accept yourself could make the question seem to be sincere. The only thing that can be surely known by any living thing is what it is. From this one point of certainty, it looks on other things as certain as itself….”

It is impossible to deny, unless denial is where one would rather be. However, for those willing to learn, it speaks to the truth in us and peels back the insanity we have covered it over with, and for just an instant, we remember we know. Who We are is blatant in the mind as it receives the basic logic of reality, desired wholly and without confusion… This is what Atonement is for…

This moment, this day, with this lesson as a catalyst we can allow the memory of our Self to hurl forward to the front of our awareness in a single holy instant. ~How ‘bout it?~ Let us join in accepting the purpose our Father has appointed this world be for us… and not look back ~

The past is gone. And with it all confusion ~ replaced by the certainty that we are One Son, forever the same as God created us to be, before time seemed to take away the recognition of our identity.

All seeming questions to every situation that we seem to encounter will be answered in the light of this acceptance, and we will know what do. It is revealed to us in each present moment, guided by or purpose of Atonement.

This is vision… this is the prayer we pray as one this day, in deepest gratitude:

“I will accept Atonement for myself… For I remain as God created me”.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Lesson 138:

Heaven is the decision I must make…

Just a few years ago, when ‘my way’ came to its irrefutable end, I sat naked and empty~ free at last to be teachable... I visited this subject (Heaven is the decision I must make) with the sober heart and open mind that a student of as she sits at her master’s feet when ready at last to be the truth. Here’s how the inquiry went, for me…

“Heaven? ~I thought I made the choice for heaven long ago, yet now I see that I’ve been wrong. Tell me what Heaven is and what my choosing it is for… What does this mean? …

Heaven is a still, eternal, peaceful state of mind. Heaven is where Reality is. Heaven is being. It is knowledge. It is love. Heaven is synonymous with the Father and the Son. Heaven is the power of all creation as one. There is nowhere Heaven is not…

“If this be so, why is it a decision I must make, when choice is not its attribute? When one is everything one has everything. So where is choice perceived?”

Heaven is the decision one must make when one has forgotten the truth of Heaven itself; which is the truth of what we are.

I prayed out the fear-purge, “How is it that I know not who I am? How is it, too, that I have mistake myself for a tiny, guilty, fearful, sometimes happy, sometimes not, mass of carbon matter? How is it too, that, even in my private chamber, I am suspicious that perhaps there is a secret mole within my psyche, selling me out to the highest bidder, crumbling my structure of happiness, as soon I begin to feel its mine. How fragile is this carbon unit, requiring constant attention to stay fit; armed with intellect and muscle and cunning and skill, just to meet the requirement necessary when the games begin. And begin they must, for such are the dictates of the tyrannical leader~ king ego~ whose influence is the life/death basis of all the compulsory competing with the billion others, just like me…

“Where is Heaven? I know only of the obsession for acquisition of the secret, Holy Grail, which would reveal it to me. This priceless unknown magic that would make all this senseless searching, meaningless battling with an elusive enemy beyond my understanding, come to an end at last. And with it all the dirge of confusion, the elegy of contradictory ideas of happiness and redemption~ come at last to rest as sense upon my tired soul, restoring life eternal… to what I have made? “

This has been the illusion I cherished in place of Heaven. Why?

Simply this…

I would not truly look within; look and the look further still, look with Holy Spirit’s sight… I was afraid. I was wrong about my fears, but nonetheless, I stopped short of His help because of my lack of trust and my belief about myself. I thought I could not bear to look upon the darkness I feared would suck me into nothingness.

I would not look at my fear of God, for fear I would loose the image of a loving, forgiving God, I had designed to medicate my ever-pervasive guilt ~keep me one step ahead of myself till all the damage had been repaired… or some such bull which I believed.

I didn’t want to feel shitty… plain as day… I wanted to escape whatever hell I had gotten myself into, up to this point… and feel better now. Why couldn’t that be it?”

Ok, here’s the thing. This sophisticated; ego trap was designed to obliterate truth from ever approaching the single mind of the Son of God. So cunning and seductive are its methods to keep its own survival, it is deadly to underestimate its investment and power. This is why the Course speaks about the ego in personified terms. So we can see outside ourselves, the thought system we have subscribed to within our mind. Here’s the thing, too, (and its no small thing), this thought system has power equal only to the choice to believe it real.

Withdraw that belief ~ withdraw its power.

This cannot be done by avoidance… one cannot escape what one has made real in ones mind until it, in all its glory, has been placed on the table before us and seen for the fraud and boogie-man it is… Like today’s lesson says: “Heaven is chosen consciously. The choice cannot be made until alternatives are accurately seen and understood. All that is veiled in shadows must be raised to understanding, to be judged again, this time with Heaven's help. And all mistakes in judgment that the mind had made before are open to correction, as the truth dismisses them as causeless. Now are they without effects. They cannot be concealed, because their nothingness is recognized’.

Finally, it is the willingness to do this looking, fortified with the eternal safety that comes from opening to the Holy Spirit’s steady presence within mind, that allows one to make the one decision that must be made.

Heaven. ~It made all the difference…

The certainty that comes with total reliance on the Holy Spirit’s interpretation let me lean back and quit resisting… I realized the unknown as myself…

The Holy Spirit has a way of unrelentingly encouraging one ~ regardless of the seeming circumstances …

The Holy Spirit uses every defense against the truth, as a means of showing how it contradicts the very thing it purports to offer and instead perpetuates the seeming reality of the very thing defended against… And in the Now, simultaneously, the Holy Spirit begins awakening the mind to the alternative way of seeing things. Events become just events; situations, just situations; and circumstances are just circumstances… Personal identification with them begins to diminish.

A sense of generous understanding takes the place of specific persons and needs... The idea that one has been here before and it all worked out in the end… takes the place of anticipation and regret… And patience now becomes a steady pulse… of knowing that one can’t but be at the right place at the right time for everything to work together for good for all. Acceptance of a new meaning for time/space replaces the old as understanding unfolds what time is for… resistance makes no sense. Heaven is the decision I must make. I make it now, and will not change my mind, because it is the only thing I want…

Let’s make this indelible decision together today and let the comfort of our choice show Heaven’s meaning everywhere in everyone and encounter we have today… It is ours, after all…

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Lesson 137:

When I am healed I am not healed alone… Our function is to let our minds be healed, that we may carry healing to the world, exchanging curse for blessing, pain for joy, and separation for the peace of God…

Once again this is a Course in mind, and sickness is a malady of the mind given over to the belief that what God created One could be and has been split and separated off. Sickness therefore is synonymous with separation and healing synonymous with oneness… We cannot be healed alone, because we are not alone.

A belief, no matter how large the scale of its acceptance, is not the truth. The body is then further removed from truth, through a series of individualizing characteristics to solidify that the split mind’s focus be limited to its specifics and needs…

The truth is; never, at any moment, did the body exist at all…

It is so easy to get fixated from and in where we believe we are, and then try to assess circumstances and change from within the very thought system that got us into this mess in the first place, because belief makes perception real to the mind of the believer. So we have the seemingly natural tendency to look at ‘problems in the body, the world and our lives’, as needing to be solved on that level… We must remember that thoughts leave not their source; the body was the ego’s ‘redesign’ of what we are. The basis of the ego’s plan to get away from the Holy Spirit’s influence in the mind was the making of the body in the first place… Remember in lesson 122: “The ego’s fundamental wish is to replace God. In fact, the ego is the physical embodiment of that wish. For it is that wish that seem to surround the mind with a body, keeping separate and alone, and unable to reach other minds except through the body that was made to imprison it…”

This is the insane premise we’re talking about that this lesson prompts us to see. It is the body (ego-embodiment) which convinces us that the physical world is real. Yet the body was made as part of the ego’s plan (The Grand Illusion) to mask ‘Reality’. So it can hardly be thought to be a reliable source to gain the truth we seek.

Here’s a poignant passage from the text that specifies this dynamic in chapter 18: “From the world of bodies, made by insanity, insane messages seem to be returned to the mind that made it. And these messages bear witnesses to this world, pronouncing it as true… Everything these messages relay to you is quite external. There are no messages that speak of what lies underneath, (Who we are in truth), for it is not the body that could speak of this. Its eyes perceive it not; its senses remain quite unaware of it; its tongue cannot relay its messages”…

Let’s be honest, every witness to the body’s reality and made Spirit to seem unreal, have come through this body mechanism… When we made visible what was not real, what was true became invisible to us… The body seems outside us, projected there by mind. Yet having identified ourselves with it, we subject ourselves to the rules of the body as if we were victim to them. Our sensory organs relay to the brain-mind the conditions of our circumstances and health. And yet, as the Course keeps restating, the body is a neutral thing; saying even that it is the one thing in all the world that does not know what reality is: “The body cannot know. And while you limit your awareness to its tiny senses, you will not see the grandeur that surrounds you. (T18.Viii)

The one mind of God’s Son must change its mind. And it was for this purpose, that Atonement principle was give by God, in answer to our dilemma.

Here’s a passage from the text that gives us step-one for this change:To change all this, and open up a road of hope and of release in what appeared to be an endless circle of despair, you need but to decide you do not know the purpose of the world. You give it goals it does not have, and thus do you decide what it is for… You choose your dreams, for they are what you wish, perceived as if it had been given you”… (T-29.VII.8)

This zeros us back to healing, Now. The Holy Spirit is the part of the mind we all share, which is instituted for the specific purpose of holding Reality/Truth in mind and reinterpreting everything that we, (one, joint son) have made to separate it from our awareness, and replace the presence of mind in reality, giving it a healed meaning that unites us all in a unified purpose in God.

Practically, daily, today, this looks like forgiveness, which is of the mind, of others, for the Self… “When I am healed I am not healed alone. And I would share my healing with the world, that sickness may be banished from the mind of God's one Son, Who is my only Self… Let healing be through you this very day… And as you rest in quiet, be prepared to give as you receive, to hold but what you give, and to receive the Word of God to take the place of all the foolish thoughts that ever were imagined… When I am healed I am not healed alone. And I would bless my brothers, for I would be healed with them, as they are healed with me.~

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Lesson 136:

Sickness is a defense against the truth…

What if we really let the truth of this statement sink beneath our concept so what sickness is~… past the body, and the body-mind, to the receptor-sites of truth, itself… To the truth of who are we, always, now… complete and healed and whole…

A major theme throughout the Course is that sickness is of the mind. It has one cause and one cause only: the belief that separation from Our Cause (God) could, and did occur.

The Course presents us with a thorough thought-reversal program to replace the golden idol (the body), with all its matter-dictates, which we have enslaved ourselves to, up until now.

The neutrality of the body, seen with no attributes of its own, becomes a communication device for the joining through the Holy Spirit’s voice with in the mind that knows no separation is possible. The Holy Spirit reestablishes Presence of Mind. And mind cannot be split off into separate, private entities, nestled in the comfortable, grey-matter mattress called a brain, to serve the dictates of its tyrannical host, the body.

Now, let me say at this point, that when the miracle came and the Course literally showed up on my doorstep, I was a mass of body thoughts~ The End~.

I could not have even imagined I could conceptualize residing elsewhere… all my plans and actions were run through the matrix of the body, and that is what my world was peopled with ~bodies competing against bodies for happiness.

But alas, I felt the call for God, beckoning “~another way of looking at the world and at myself”~ and, ding-dong, the Course was gifted me…Thank-you God.

At any rate, the Course unravels the composition of the separate-body-mind which was designed to serve this body-separation belief construct so as to show us consistently that whatever we have ‘given-life’ to within this dream of separation, can through the Miracle, be given a new purpose [and indeed, already has been, by God, through the Holy Spirit].

This is the Atonement: Truth answers the upside-down idea of cause and effect which characterizes the spawn fathered by separation. It is constructed to address every belief equally~ disillusionment dissolves in the light…

Due to the inane (yet seemingly concrete) nature of the time-space cosmos in which the dream played out, coupled with our addiction to compulsively replaying the dirge, the Holy Spirit comes to us as a gentle waking that occurs as we no longer see ourselves as, or in a body, but a beyond.

The methodology the miracle employs for this awareness is forgiveness. Forgiveness and healing are one in the same.

We look honestly upon what we have made and what we have assigned the ‘others-in-bodies’ be and do, with truth behind our eyes, and the faint awareness of its impossibility is present. The sense of ‘nothing having been done to us in truth’, subtlety finds residence within our mind, resulting in a feeling of unreality, which questions the validity of all the messages the body‘s sentinels of darkness, disguised as friends, delivered previously. Now we are no longer wholly insane…

Here are a few key elements to ego’s game that seem noteworthy. The trap of the body-reality, in whatever way it shows up, which is constantly; sickness, pleasure, pain, sex, diet, exercise, functionality aspects, are all one thing and one thing only~ a defense against the truth.

That is the trap that must be sprung. The ego’s trap employs all the mechanics of addiction, to snare us. These include; mindlessness by way of distraction through busyness, planning, pleasure seeking and avoiding pain. These are temptation constructs designed for the mind that chooses deception, complete with; euphoric-recall, compulsion, and obsession, high’s/lows, withdrawal, looping back and round and round we go…

How ‘bout we seek no longer the gift of pain, valuing the body in place of truth has wrought? Let the truth within us give us the voice that asks: “Do I want to continue to defend myself against the truth? “Do I desire a world I rule instead of one that rules me? Do I desire a world where I am powerful instead of helpless? Do I desire a world in which I have no enemies and cannot sin? Do I want to see what I denied because it is the truth?

When the answer is unequivocally, “I want the truth instead of this, the body ceases to be relevant and only its usefulness to our unified purpose remains….

Monday, May 14, 2007

Lesson 135:

If I defend myself I am attacked…

This lesson brings home to us where we must operate from if we are identified with being a body, in a world of bodies, surviving and trying to be happy here... It brings to mind the subversive, undermining quality inherent in self-initiated plans, which, pretty much are a requirement for survival, if one believes this world real…

You know, I didn’t even hear the part in the lesson about ‘self-initiated plans and that planning was a defense against the truth and trusting the Holy Spirit, the first couple of times I did the lessons. I was way too caught-up in what it was saying about the body identification, since I was aware that body identification was where I was doing business from in my so-called life at the time. The simple logic is clear: if I am, or feel I need to defend myself, whether it is my body or my position or even opinion, I must be identifying myself as weak and in need of protection. I must feel fairly insecure within my ’self’ if I’m always in constant defense… The next natural connection is how this applied to relationships. The body’s entire defense system; smarts, status, looks, etc. are for the purpose of having relationships one can feel one control-by-self-design, and to keep its parameters protected.

Needless to say, at some point, I came to realize that ‘i’ (self-concept-self) was only having imaginary relationships with imaginary figures and an imaginary ‘self’. Unsatisfying.

So much of what passes for ‘connection’ conversation; even entire ‘special relationships’ in this world is based in this defense posture. We pose as confident figures to be reckoned with, while secretly we feel vulnerable and weak and vigilant to maintain seeming control. We impose our ‘self-importance’ onto all situations and conversations, seeing only the dynamics that will support or threaten, all in defense keeping hidden the dark, secret self, beneath. We are all the ‘hero’ of the dream we dream… The miracle brings to mind another way of perceiving everything. While seemingly still constructed as before, yet unified purpose, it offers a single meaning. One which forgives by recognizing the false for what it is. We see that the truth of who we are reflected upon the dream instead…

Back to this thing about self-imitated plans… Here’s how it went for me. I really could not help but notice that my best laid plans never really worked out the way I hoped…It seems one can’t really control all the aspects and possibilities that could figure in to the outcome…

I was one who felt safe in structure; give me the rules, how to get the job done and what results I could expect, if I agreed that it would further perpetuate my self-concept, I could deal, work hard, succeed… I ask only that the structure need deliver on its promises, what I decided it promised… No need to trust ~ I had a contract, if only in my mind… What happened for me was that, when faced with the futility of gaining security, certainty and happiness through this structure-system was a complete bust, I saw it for what it was instead, merely a dream about a world of which I was but a part. I dropped my defenses, with white flag in hand, I ask for the other way…

Through the miracle, I began to experience myself as the dreamer of this dream. I also began to see that all its scenes and scenarios were written in the past; couched in precepts that simply weren’t relevant to the present experience of love that forgiveness offered me. Part of the undoing of my thought system included looking at how making plans (that’s any desired outcome in mind) immediately put me under the guidance of the voice for which the plan was made. And I would be swept-up in the future-izing momentum of my plan. That rendered me temporarily unavailable to hear the Voice for God within my mind…

Here’s the twisted part. It seemed I’d be beholden to play it (self-initiated plan) out till my plans failed. Or (gratefully), until I would come to some out of time instant of awareness that I was the dreamer of the dream and I could dream the dream of trust in God’s plan, instead.

As my experience with allowing the Holy Spirit to guide increased, and forgiveness began to reflect a different world, I began to experience trust. I didn’t know that I had never felt trust before. As a matter of fact I would have argued a case for it… but everything in illusion is conditional and limited.

It was not until I began to experience the peace of God that comes to the mind when it is truly still an instant, that the awareness of trust began to give meaning to my life and my function here.

OF COURSE, it’s all being handled for the best possible good, for each seeming individual, at the stage of belief in the time-space cosmos, they have placed themselves, at any given moment or circumstance!

Only Mind vast enough to see the entire picture, every fine nuance, the past, future and the wholeness beyond the fragments, uniting them in One Moment, NOW… which is the return to eternity… Could be in charge, Yes!? Dud, that’s not me.

Somewhere in my mind I had taken on the mantra “Everything goes my way”, and now I was beginning to see why… What it meant wasn’t what I originally had it wired-up as, part of ‘creating my own reality’ doctrine, which is forgiven as one recognizes First Cause: Creation is of God and that which is not of Him exists not at all.

The ‘my’ of my mantra was no longer speaking for the self of concepts, but was revealing itself as the Self~ the true identity in God. … When the temptation to defend arises, it is now seen as a forgiveness lesson, easily learned, for the yummy award of certainty that accompanies trust in God’s plan for salvation…

From today’s lesson:”... And in the light and joy of simple trust, you will but wonder why you ever thought that you must be defended from release…If I defend myself I am attacked. But in defenselessness I will be strong, and I will learn what my defenses hide… Nothing but that. We present our self to our Creator as we really are”.

Thank you for joining me in this memory of defenselessness and trust… everything does go our way, for ours is the way God appointed it to be…

Sunday, May 13, 2007

Lesson 134:

Let me perceive forgiveness as it is...

What is forgiveness? Forgiveness is the instrument given for application of the miracle. It is the correction for our faulty way of thinking and perceiving. It shifts the mind from judgment, condemnation, and divisive perception, to the forgiven perspective of sameness and wholeness, where illusions are seen as one call for love and answered simultaneously with the love we are in truth… All for one and one for all as the musketeers say… No one is crucified alone, and yet no one can enter Heaven by himself

We are not of this world. We are at home in God, exactly as He created… We merely dream a dream of a world where we are exiled and beholden to forces not our own, and because we accord it value by our belief in it, this seems to be our reality. It is this perspective what must be forgiven; the mistaken thought that anything not of God, could exist… Here’s the simple part: Doing this is not our job! It is the Holy Spirit’s. We but merely ready ourselves but by bringing our twisted thinking/perception to the Holy Spirit and let them got to be reinterpreted for us. Then we wait with empty hands and open heart…

Now how does this look in this so-called life, , we ask? One must keep in mind that a cornerstone idea of the ego thought system is that someone else is responsible for what is happening to us; our pain, discomfort, fear… Any body will do, as long as it doesn’t rest my shoulders, and spoil my innocent self identity, yes?

In chapter 27 of the text, the Course says: “The ‘reasoning’ by which the world is made, is simply this: You are the cause of what I do. Your presence justifies my wrath, and you exist and think apart from me. While you attack I must be innocent. And what I suffer from is your attack”. So the actual application takes place from truth back to truth but addresses the detour into illusion the mind believes; that is we forgive each other for what has not been done to us. We’re not pardoning or overlooking what others have done to us, or to our ‘families, friends, country~ whatever is an extension of the self-concept, but the belief in the construct of attack all together…

Fundamentally, forgiveness is based on an inner shift in how we see ourselves. If our basic self-concept is in this so-called word of victims and perpetrators, where we are desiring to see ourselves as ‘innocent’, then of course we must believe that others have done to us, sinned against us, and cannot be forgiven. This puts us in a state where it feels we’re being ‘dreamed-up’ by some force outside ourselves and powerless… “No one can waken from a dream the world is dreaming for him. He becomes a part of someone else’s dream. He cannot choose to waken from a dream he did not make. Helpless he stands, a victim to a dream conceived and cherished by a separate mind… (T-27.VII)

Forgiveness is the instrument for remembering our true identity as Christ; for listening for one voice that joins us all in purpose. This, ultimately, allows us to recognize our nature in God; which is complete invulnerability and imperturbability… making is only natural to withdraw the judgments we projected outside ourselves. We begin to perceive the same people or situations differently, for we realize that behind and substantiating each one is the fundamental error or illusion we could separate from our Source. And with this comes a deep recognition that this could not be so.

Forgiveness is the gentle waking dream to replace all that we thought we thought before. We are now living in awareness of our internal guide, the Holy Spirit, which sees only mistakes that need correction…

Let me perceive forgiveness as it is. Would I accuse myself of doing this? I will not lay this chain upon myself. The evaluation process requires only a little willingness by us to question our interpretation of any given situation…

Do we want to be right or happy? Boy, that one statement from the course, when accepted completely, entirely blows the mind!!! Once considered honestly, one can no longer rely on any previous ideas of what happiness is, but must surrender utterly to God’s Will.

This simple criterion provides the means to shift from the closed to the open mind, allowing the Holy Spirit to show a new and healed perspective. The ‘being right-ness’ of the ego thought system is paid for with our happiness, in trade for the simulated feeling of innocence, loaded on the feeling-drug of ‘having been wronged’…

I love the passage in the Course that says: “Beware of the temptation to perceive yourself unfairly treated…” It hit me like a ton of lead one day while I was watching my children play. I’d been watching and judging for an indefinite time frame ~ till ~god knows~ whenever his mom saw fit to arrive to pick him up, that the kid visiting was a total pain in the ass and the present bane of my existence. The feelings I was having were so far out of kilter from the relative state of peace I was becoming accustomed to as my modes operandi; that it was like a loud speaker went off in my mind, with this phrase from the Course; “Beware of the temptation to perceive yourself unfairly treated!” Suddenly, truly, it sent me into a belly laugh I can still feel…

The Holy Spirit represents a Higher Court, which sees through and beyond, to the simple truth of what we are and nothing we have judged or felt guilty about is seen as real.

All this wasted effort on our part of repairing damage done, thinking what should have been done or will do next time, only serve to reinforce illusion in the mind that is trapped in the cycle of separation, guilt, blame and death which are the ego thought system. This is seeing error as real and then attempting to pardon the case we have already assigned judgment to…

The ‘Higher Court’ merely dismisses the case we’ve made against ourselves… “There can be no case against a child of God, and every witness to guilt in God’s creations is bearing false witness to God Himself… Appeal everything you believe gladly to God’s Own Higher Court because it speaks for Him and therefore speaks truly. It will dismiss the case against you, however carefully you have built it up. The egos thought system maybe “fool-proof, but it is not God-proof “. (T-5.VI) Today, being Mother’s Day, brings to my mind one of my favs’: the powerful forgiveness lesson we’ll call my identity as ‘being a bad mother’, cherished by guilt and shame, I wore it like a scarlet letter. I remember the texture of the hopeless feeling of unforgivable destiny I used to carry with me around the ‘special relationship’ I had with this identity… When at last, I recognized that I could not keep this identity and recognize myself, the children an all children as God’s creation, I placed my guilty heart upon the alter, for the Holy Spirit’s reinterpretation, to be replace by the truth.

Christ-Love is what I see now, behind the shadows fondly referred to as my children. I feel the deep appreciation and joy that come from seeing my brothers as myself. Only through the Holy Spirit as the source of our sight and interpreter of our so-called lives, can we see forgiveness as it really is… This is the springboard… “All that is asked of you is to make room for the truth. You are asked to make or do what lies beyond your understanding. All you are asked to do is let it in; only to stop your interference with what will happen of itself… undoing is not your task, but it is up to you to welcome it or not… (T-21.II) Let today be a day where we allow all we thought be transformed through our willingness to forgive…