Saturday, December 1, 2007

Lesson 336:

Forgiveness lets me know that minds are joined….

What a glorious gift to bring to this worn out diverse reality. Ours for the asking, forgiveness eliminates the need for perception, allowing us to see what is present now; which is the vision of Christ… It is begins with our willingness to close the seeming gap between subject and object, you and me; and to experience the ‘fact’ that minds are joined. As we become increasingly willing to dispel the belief in private thoughts and value only what can be shared, we come to find ourselves within the whole embodiment of the now. It is profoundly unique in experience of this world which exists only in the past. Yet, the brilliant eternal aliveness of the present moment extends into experience of a forgiven past.

Turns out our willingness ‘to see this differently’ is always, in all ways, enough. The Holy Spirit works within the miracle; beyond yet within the construct in which we currently believe of time; past or future. It’s like He hears our prayer for Atonement within our hearts even before we are aware we have prayed it: “let me see my brother as myself”… Oh yeah, ‘the slightest invitation’ and recognition can be called to mind through the Holy Spirit within our Mind… for it has already done.

This life is like a big déja vu, ne’st pas? That feeling of déja vu, is one of the side effects, if you will, becoming progressively more noticeable as forgiveness transforms judgment’s perception as precedence within the mind. Vision takes the place of what the eyes are seeing and serves up meaning from a unified perspective, leaving the body’s eyes to serve the Holy Spirit’s purpose rather than the ‘specifics’ which the split mind is so full of … the details look ever-so the same. Yet, the experience is present, full and unified. It is alive…

This is the blessing of vision that forgiveness gives; here I feel all of me present within all, and specifics line-up…. It is the miracle in effect, and I notice, in a way that it is clear to me, that it all has been done. Fear of future and guilt of past are vague memory elements, yet the memory of Present Love, is Now….This ‘present’ is the alive texture of my day-to-day life … Within it is room to heal the mind; allowing this ‘forgiveness-lesson-drama/re-gathering of Self, with its stresses, and romances and pleasures and pains, of ‘the character I play, seem like some kind of déja vu dream, ~impossible to take too seriously for long.

Our reality is only Spirit and Spirit’s primacy and grace shine on everything. Forgiveness lets me see that you are me, and that there is one Self, the one we share, uniting us with God.

In quiet may forgiveness wipe away my dreams of separation and of sin. Then let me, Father, look within, and find Your promise of my sinlessness is kept; Your Word remains unchanged within my mind, Your Love is still abiding in my heart”.

Friday, November 30, 2007

Lesson 335:

I choose to see my brother’s sinlessness….

As with all perception, I see only what I want to be there. This, in itself is a huge hurdle, perhaps the largest. Bottom-line, nothing exists outside my mind. I notice that as long as I endorsed (valued) a private mind, I could not wrap my mind around this idea of ‘you believe what you see, because you see what you believe’…. It was just too small to grasp, I guess…. Somehow my willingness to be wrong, allowed me to see that the same mind that seemingly chooses daily perceptions, with or without forgiveness, with or without love or attack, is the same one-mind that originated the crucial premise; the idea of separation, which instigated and maintains the entire sudo-reality of time and space, and rights and wrongs, and loneliness and bodies, fear and forgiveness, and you and me~ Gosh, if you boil it down to the zero point… all concepts, all seemingly real, all hinge on the self-concept; the idea called 'me'.

~Funny isn’t it, when ya really see that… It’s what I like to call ‘the big cosmic belly laugh’…. Cuz there is no me, or you…

There is only God and His Son; the extension of His Love. Another word for this ‘me’ I am referring to, is of specialness.

Specialness is the me that is always wanting more than everything~ it is the subject. The ‘you’ is anything or one ‘other’. It is the object for subject’s acquisition or enhancement…. That’s the dream… and none of it is real.

It was within the holy instant where ‘reality’/Love/truth, where I first experienced the clarity of oneness, which directed me toward the awareness that I am, indeed, the dreamer of the dream. Within this awareness , too, was the gift of the Atonement : that is my will, as God’s Will for me, to fulfill my function as the dreamer…

That function is to forgive and see this world differently; to see my brother’s sinlessness, to recognize my own.

I simply allow the Holy Spirit within mind to decide for God for me, and show me my forgiveness curriculum. I choose to see my brother sinless because that is the only way I feel loving toward him. And I, simply, can no longer tolerate less than loving feelings. The slightest attachment to outcome, the merest outside-Self referent, puts me on shaky ground. ~For peace is the only state where I know you or myself at all. And from peace I feel our oneness. Forgiveness is the answer: I choose to see the situation through forgiving eyes where you are sinless and so am I.

This is also the choice for freedom; returning me to Mind, because choice for forgiveness is the switch allowing me to listen to the Voice for God. This reminds me that I am the dreamer and whatever I might have originally perceived as an example of ‘sin’, I now choose to see as a chance to forgive, recognize what is my perception, is not really there. That the fear and guilt/ lack of peace is clearly in my mind….

My same Mind, which with the Holy Spirit, can now see beyond and into the heart of love we share. The choice for forgiveness; the choice to see your innocence, gives me back my dignity and changes everything.

It allows Love to rule the day, define the moments… and allow Presence to permeate everything, here and now… It is always enough….

Thank you for your holy light that shines eternal, that I may see my Self through you~ I love you~

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Lesson 334:

Today I claim the gifts forgiveness gives…

I love this time in the mornings where peace is so pervasive. For me, this space in the wee hours, that many years ago I designated as time I devoted exclusively to my relationship with God has transmuted many times… The changelessness of this state of peace has been invaluable to my recognizing what, indeed, peace is.

It has been a space of reverence for my alter to God; a place of prayer and contemplation, a space of honesty and transformation of the honesty concept, of attempted negotiation till surrender to truth’s obvious value became apparent… And above all it has been a place where I let truth find me and where also, there was my Self, waiting for me to notice…

It was here, first, that I began to recognize my ‘true’ identity, my identity in Christ; and therefore my inseparable relationship with you as Christ, unified in our oneness and our love…

The safety and completeness allowed for this time in the a.m. each day to expand and extend, until it became natural way of the day, as it is now.

So, I continue to rise early and rest in great peace and expectancy.

In the forgiven darkness of the awakening light, now is always; there is no time, but only our forever-ness.

Heavens dawn reveals the obvious; for-give-ness is my only function here, a natural requisite to move about the day in the dream in eternal peace. Ah, how I love the dreamer; self or brother~ it’s all Self. This delicious feeling of peace and oneness is so typical and obvious of the gifts forgiveness brings, making it so easy to behold my brother sinless in mind…

Forgiveness gives us the chance to experience a state where we feel completely unified with all that is, with no known desire but this experience.

All my efforts these recent years have been devoted to the quick restorative to this state of forgiveness. Which boosts my willingness to be vigilant to look squarely on at all that interferes with this state of unadulterated peace. I have learned to be a happy learner and happily I look honestly with the Holy Spirit at what I see and therefore what I believe, so as to forgive the false beliefs that I chose to defile the alter to my Father/ brother/Self. The simple fact that they cannot be true unfolds and allows the Holy Spirit within my mind to show me another way of looking at whatever it is. And finally, I am allowing the shadow of seeming ‘reality’ disperse into the nothingness in which it came…

Ah, the gifts forgiveness brings… this dwelling place is the only home for me now and from which I never stray too far, for I recognize the call for love.

Love’s gentle call is always within range… I hear it through your lips, see it in your eyes, and feel it in your heart ~ they are mine as well. The so-called physical trappings of the world serve only as a backdrop for the magnificent business of re-member-ing our full identity as Christ. Thank you for your gifts to me… without you I am nothing… Forever we are the effect of our Father Cause~ His Love is all that in truth, compels at all, oui?

Today’s lesson’s prayer:

”I seek but the eternal. For Your Son can be content with nothing less than this. What, then, can be his solace but what You are offering to his bewildered mind and frightened heart, to give him certainty and bring him peace? Today I would behold my brother sinless. This Your Will for me, for so will I behold my sinlessness.

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Lesson 333:

Forgiveness ends the dream of conflict here….

I was always one to attempt to avoid conflict. These attempts were ultimately futile. This world is conflict materialized, yes? It was designed by a cunning mad idea that postured a ‘reality’ in opposition to all that is; where Oneness is no more. In its place there reigns a hierarchy of orders and levels. Levels of ‘specialness’ and scarcity determine ones value and survival… where there are beginnings and endings. The end and the king is death; the ultimate proof of defeat.

This of course requires bodies to house this idea and to ‘give life to death’, yes? I know it sounds a bit insane when seen with any reason. But then, that’s precisely why we attempt to avoid looking at all, let alone with the Mind of reason; the Mind we share, untainted, whole, and free. ~ No more shadow boxing!

The Course tells us: “Forgiveness is the healing of the perception of separation… The Holy Spirit’s function is to take the broken picture of the Son of God and put the pieces into place again. This Holy picture, healed entirely, does He hold out to every separate piece that thinks it is a picture in itself. To each He offers His identity, which the whole picture represents… The willingness to let illusions go is all the Healer of God Son requires….”

This Mind where we are always already united as one through the Holy Spirit is always already present ~we can’t loose it. It is not in conflict and is joyously fulfilling the function of implementing the Atonement, as long as any part of the mind of God’s Son serves itself up to the remedial rumination of the time/space separation idea….

Here’s what I finally saw: the key to all resolution in this world is beyond this world… Forgiveness allows me to look square on at where I seem to experience conflict and to allow the reason that sings deep within, that permeates and resonates till I can feel the truth that is all ways calling me back to point zero. Forgiveness is sort of a mechanism to shake me just enough to see that it isn’t just that I’m choosing to see conflict, but that a thought system that see conflict where there is none could not be real. ‘Only illusions battle; and only with them selves…’ which, now I recognize as simply more of the same original mad idea that one could separate from one’s Source… That idea can’t do anything else… that’s why the dream… It’s not possible in reality, where all is one… This oneness is the healed perception of Christ vision which is ours. It is always available to me I notice, as soon as I am fully willing to hide nothing… Now, this makes for much easier viewing because you’re looking at it exactly as it is, where it is thought to be, in the reality which has been given it, and with the purpose that the mind accorded it.

Illusion is where conflict and all its bedfellows live. ~I do not ~I am above the battleground; forgiving and healing the mind that thought it was here… ~For I am as God created me, still exactly free ~to dream of conflict or not. I accept the Atonement and all my dream of conflict are transformed through forgiveness because their premise now is seen. No compromise is possible. Premise; where one appears, the other disappears. And which you share becomes the only one you have. You have the one that you accept, because it is the only on you wish to have…. Why would I defend against a shadow? Now I let it be…The false is false. Period. And only the truth is true. Period. Accepting the Atonement for yourself means not to give support to someone’s dream of sickness or death. It means that you share not his wish to separate, and let him turn illusion on himself…

The miracle is the premise metamorphosis the Atonement principle insists ... Forgiveness is it’s lamp to access the light of truth and truth shines in its wake and whatever ‘it’ was, disappears…

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Lesson 332:

Fear binds the world. Forgiveness sets it free….

The world, regardless of its apparent ‘life-of-its-own’, is, after all, in the mind…

I am at home in God, merely plugged into the dream-matrix of the ego world-program; ‘residual self- image, as it were. The programmer was the tiny mad idea of separation which fathered the whole gig of impossibility … It is our fear that binds us to it, and keeps the amnesia at the forefront of mind. This makes being characters in the dream seem completely viable.

As if we don’t absolutely know some place in the deep recesses of our mind that it’s all bogus; that something just isn’t right. ‘Like a splinter in the mind’, to use a Matrix term.

You know what I found? You can’t keep busy enough, steady enough or long enough to stay away from pervasive nagging feeling ~not really, can you?

Eventually, in a single present moment, where now is more relevant that the ongoing story, it catches you off guard~ it, being the possibility that the lens is distorted and a new one is required. Then, right there, waiting but the asking, is the Holy Spirit’s lens.

I am joyously unlearning what I taught myself through accepting forgiveness as my only function.

Simultaneously this allows for me to accept the Holy Spirits version of the world I see. Forgiveness taps us into inspiration and certainty; inspiration coming from the Voice for God and certainty from the Law of God... making it possible to looks out upon a forgiven world through the lens for-giving light and love…

We can, indeed, free our minds through forgiveness. As we must and certainly all will… for it is God’s Will that we are free… We know freedom is ours, as we offer freedom to all.

Truth undoes the ego’s illusions, by shining them away. Forgiveness, it turns out, really is the key to happiness. As I let all things be exactly as they are, it is forgiveness I am allowing to do its part in the awakening to the always-present truth. Like the lesson says, “Truth merely is. And by its presence is the mind recalled from fantasies, awaking to the real. Forgiveness bids this presence enter in, and take its rightful place within the mind…”

Forgiveness lights up my mind where fantasies of fear and inconsistent happiness and frustration sat just a dream ago.

Peace comes of itself within the mind that stops meddling, falsifying and story-telling of another outside my Self… Self contains all. And oh, how yummy it is~ Love, in fact.

In the belly of love, it’s easy to press the forgiveness button in the projector and allow the script to play out however it must~ and trust. After all, we are already at home in God … I don’t suppose too much time could be wasted in contemplating true forgiveness through practical application… Heaven knows we’ve got enough subject matter… Everyone, situation, belief, etc., etc., in one’s so-called life, has been spirit-picked, so to speak, for the perfect healing of each and every aspect of the mind of Son of God which dreamed itself split and separate. And forgiveness is the mechanism that erases the lines… Oneness shines the truth through the once special hate or love relationships, now transformed as holy relationships, reflecting our true identity through our relationship with God….

Monday, November 26, 2007

12. What is the ego?

This is what I love: “Yet will one lily of forgiveness change the darkness into light; the altar to illusions to the shrine of Life Itself. And peace will be restored forever to the holy minds which God created as His Son, His dwelling place, His joy, His love, completely His, completely one with Him”. (W-12.5) This statement so concisely articulates a full-on description of life as I know it on the boardwalk/’the bridge to the Real world’ or ‘borderland’ (ACIM lingo). Everything every made to embellish, authenticate or rule with, which is contained by this world-life, is used; purified by forgiveness’ implementation through the Holy Spirit. This is, of course, due to the Atonement principle; the return to the unified perspective… to let love be as it is~ the one-mind that is God’s Son. Body perspective (ego) simply fades to the background and its validity is only significant to ‘present mind’ in as much as it is useful to the purpose of Atonement. Access has been made to the “you are me and I, you” program and wired into the mainframe of being.

Life in the dream seems useless without it… and continual restoratives are at the ready for the asking. What once was “you hurt me’, now only seems right as ‘I now longer will for hurt to be’. Fear tendencies of the past are right-sided up and revealed as: ‘trust~ which settles every problem, now’.

Lesson 331:

There is no conflict, for my will is Yours….

This is the world of forgiveness, where infinite patience seems feasible, as immediate peace is apparent with the decision for it. Conflict possibilities are seen as re-member-ing the split-off aspects of self, which are quietly accepted ‘as is’, instead. We let all things be exactly as they are. There is a pervasive resonation of peace and the feeling of being home; here and now.

Specifics and/or details of the world-dream/so-called life may not change at all and matter not (although they often do as is necessary for the good of all). It’s all the same. Nothing conflicts with oneness. The truth is simple and conflict is a concept easily forgiven by seeing its impossibility in oneness.

Hangin’ out in awakening is so simply yummy cuz everything is Love; easily seen for what it is, whether in its extension or request state… It’s all the same ~ and, as the cliché says: it’s all good!. Finally, continuously, that’s what it comes round to... There’s no place else to go~ nothin’ else to do~ just hang in Heaven as the dreamer; reviewing and forgiving the dream .

Today’s lesson’s prayer is like (or is) the many ‘duh!-type’ prayers I have prayed so often~ Please join me:

“How foolish, Father, to believe Your Son could cause himself to suffer! Could he make a plan for his damnation, and be left without a certain way to his release? You love me, Father. You could never leave me desolate, to die within a world of pain and cruelty. How could I think that Love has left Itself? There is no will except the Will of Love. Fear is a dream, and has no will that can conflict with Yours. Conflict is sleep, and peace awakening. Death is illusion; life, eternal truth. There is no opposition to Your Will. There is no conflict, for my will is Yours”.


Sunday, November 25, 2007

Lesson 330:

I will not hurt myself again today…

It’s yummy to say that in honesty, with absolute faith… Yes? This feeling of trust comes with accepting forgiveness as our only function…

Here’s what happened for me…. A recognition dawned in my mind of another possibility, another guide; s love/based guide already within my mind~ already guiding my life within the whole of life itself; fully directed in its entirety, awaiting but my acceptance, for perception to quickly follow to seemingly materialize it. It was but my wholehearted desire to see a unified perspective that flipped the lid to open in a mind that previously saw only reasons to fear or avoid fear. The joy of love is and always was; abundantly already flooding the system~ Forever extending~ that is the nature of love.

This is the miracle mind; awake and aware. The Course says to the extent to which we value guilt, proportionately we see a world where attack is justified. And for me, as long as guilt is of value to me, whatsoever, forgiveness attempts were just more of the same dignity attack. True forgiveness was impossible to even recognize, let alone allow. See, I thought forgiveness was something that ‘I’ did for someone else, or myself, or vise-versa. Funny how, now, that statement only feels riddled with inconsistencies… course, inconsistencies are indicative of the confused mind.

Forgiveness, it turns out, is the other way of viewing through the mind, simultaneously operating. Wholly visible by my choice to see. It is the total view. It is generous only in the sense that judgment is impossible here, for everything has the same value. All things are exactly as they are and there is no pull to desire something else. Perfection, rather than being the definition of ‘getting it just right’, reflects the impossibility of wrongness… And the ‘right Mind’ allows for illusions to be the nothingness that illusion must surely be, for it is aware of no threat from no-thing.

I’m remembering the section in the text called Perception and choice in chapter 25 where it talks about perception’s fundamental law: ‘You see what you believe is there, and you believe it there because you want it there! (BINGO) It also speaks to us of God’s more basic law: Love creates itself, and nothing but itself! (again, BINGO)

Everything which seems to form-ulate this reality eventually faces the blinding fear boogieman which dissolves into the boundless joy described in this section as the final message to the mind in error, “God is Love. (And therefore so am I).” The error-self cannot house or resonate with this spectacular awareness and its inevitable annihilation begins taking place….

‘The fear of God’ is referred to in the Course as the final obstacle to peace, which one must cross through. And it seems all obstacles boil down to this one~ we begin to see the absolute absurdity of fear, when we recognize that ‘Only Love Is’… ~ no matter what angle we come at it from, we all finally face, square on, that God and Self are the One Love that all creation is…

Once I allowed myself to see that all the ‘story’, my mind was always blabbering on about was nothing; just simply the ego; an illusion dueling it out with itself in an effort to substantiate its flimsy position within the framework of Reality where wholeness makes no allowances for specialness, it was much easier to feel the compassion inherent to wholeness, for wrong-minded ego specialness to want to survive as a possibility. That used to be me after all…

Somehow I let go the desire for the wrong-mind and became willing to forgive all the concepts contained within it, thereby allowing that the false is false and none of my business, which leaves the truth to resonate as the Self we are as one.

I love immersing myself in the only purpose that makes sense. The Atonement Principle: where forgiveness is my only function. Which, incidentally, just feels like love, eh? I couldn’t be happier about this job… like yesterdays lesson says; I have already chosen what God Wills and will it along with Him. My function and my happiness are one. I will only to see Christ in Mind ~where you and I are one…