LESSON 316:

All gifts I give my brothers are my own…

You know how sometimes it seems like you finally handled some burdensome circumstance of your life; have offered forgiveness to a particular brother or a particular situation, or perception even~ just to feel blindsided when seemingly the same problem, at least something almost like it, happens all over again? Back in the day, I took this quite personally. I told myself things like, “Something’s deficient in my spiritual program, I’m not doing it right”, etc., etc… This used to really frustrate me! That was until I realized and accepted the reason for it. And just why the similar ‘problematic’ concept serves itself up all over again…

Not only did I not want the problem; including the lack of peace that always characterized the conflicting state called “problem", which in itself offers a direct view into what I believe I am, and where I’m operating from at the time of my judgment… but, and importantly, because I can’t identify with my Self in this state.

It is not who I am in truth and the very act of ‘taking issue’ means I have forgotten and need reminding. There’s no other way home. And we do this until all spit thoughts are forgiven and all is seen with love…This is the condition of the Atonement. My responsibility is 100% accountability, at all times, to choose it for myself.

When I deny the actuality of the state I’m experiencing; when I think there’s a problem, and actually think there is an issue “out there” to resolve, it is simply a tap on the shoulder or slap in the face (whatever’s needed, eh?), which says, “Wake up! You’re dreaming and believe the dream is dreaming you”.

“Accept the dream He gave instead of yours. It is not difficult to change a dream when once the dreamer has been recognized”. (T-27.14.1-2) Always, what I’m dealing with boils down to the authority problem. It’s an authorship issue. ‘Taking issue’ is a symptom of the one problem: I think I am separate from God, (and all else): the same authority problem which fathered and characterizes the not-real world. So this is actually a gift to have show up so can look it square in the eyes and see its folly.

The seemingly, ‘previously forgiven issue’, apparently shows back up so I can see that I had my interpretation on what forgiveness was before. I know this because I had an idea of a result from my being forgiving, that would be give me the state of peace not available during ‘the problem’. ‘I’ don’t get to decide… and… There is no future peace! Peace is right here, right now! It is the natural state of my being.

Only from allowing myself to be present with it NOW, can I then let that state, where the Holy Spirit’s voice can be heard, to direct me as to the gifts I give, etc.

How convoluted is the ego’s idea of gift giving, yes? it’s always giving to get~ even if it’s to get spiritual enlightenment, yeah?

All gifts I give my brothers are my own… Due to the holographic nature of the universe, this is going be the case whether I choose littleness; to be hostage to the ego (disguised as ‘The Boss’), or host to God and accept my magnitude. From magnitude I can afford to look at the contradictions in my thought system and not take them personally, as with the littleness character; they’re just beliefs to be forgiven… they are impossible incompatibilities in the flow of peace~ blocks to Loves awareness~ not the truth. “I” don’t know what a gift is, what it’s for or when, how or to whom to give it~ not left to my own devices, that is.

This whole universe of separate special-nesses was the best ego/I could come up with. Here, every gift comes at the price of peace. So, for me, a good guide is to enter the day with the miracle worker’s prayer on my mind-lips:

“I am here only to be truly helpful. I am here to represent Him Who sent me. I do not have to worry about what to say of what to do, because He Who sent will direct me. I am content to be wherever He whishes, knowing He goes there with me. I will be healed as I let Him teach me to heal.” (T-2.18)

Now, whatever seems to show up~ peace is merely as close as my willingness. So too, is the reminder from the Holy Spirit to “Choose once again if you would take your place among the saviors of the world, or would remain in hell, and hold your brothers there.”… For He has come, and He is asking… (T-VIII.5-6).

Let’s join in the prayer for today’s lesson in communion with all our brothers through the Holy Spirit and God the Father as one:

“Father, I would accept Your gifts today. I do not recognize them. Yet I trust that You Who gave them will provide the means by which I can behold them, see their worth, and cherish only them as what I want”. Thanks for the gift of joining in a unified purpose…

Lesson 149:

My mind holds only what I think with God… When I am healed I am not healed alone… Heaven is the decision I must make…

I make is decision for Heaven now, always, and you are there with me. The decision for Heaven is the decision to be healed from our belief in hell as a possible choice.

In chapter 4 of the text, Jesus talks about our relationship with Heaven in a very real sense: “It is hard to understand what "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you" really means. This is because it is not understandable to the ego, which interprets it as if something outside is inside, and this does not mean anything. The word "within" is unnecessary. The Kingdom of Heaven you. What else you did the Creator create, and what else you is His Kingdom? This is the whole message of the Atonement; a message which in its totality transcends the sum of its parts.” (T-4.III.1-8)

This is why we are not healed alone. This is why when we accept the atonement for ourselves, which is another way of saying, “I decide for Heaven”; we accept healing, the only place where it can be found, for the whole Sonship. Only Salvation can be said to heal because all sickness has its beginning and end in the belief in separation, which is hell. All Healing must have at is core, then, one purpose. This unified purpose reacquaints us with our eternal oneness, which characterizes the mind that holds only what it thinks with God.

“The Kingdom is perfectly united and perfectly protected, and the ego will not prevail against it. Amen.” This is the prayer Jesus gives us to bring us back in touch with the truth of our being and the power of our united mind. Later in this same section of chapter 4 in the text, further clarification and assistance in dealing with the ego’s tempting persuasion is stated: “In your own mind, though denied by the ego, is the declaration of your release. This one fact means the ego does not exist, and this makes it profoundly afraid. In the ego's language, "to have" and "to be" are different, but they are identical to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit knows that you both everything and everything. Any distinction in this respect is meaningful only when the idea of "getting," which implies a lack, has already been accepted. That is why we make no distinction between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of God… The calm being of God's Kingdom, which in your sane mind is perfectly conscious, is ruthlessly banished from the part of the mind the ego rules. The ego is desperate because it opposes literally invincible odds, whether you are asleep or awake. Consider how much vigilance you have been willing to exert to protect your ego, and how little to protect your right mind. Who but the insane would undertake to believe what is not true, and then protect this belief at the cost of truth?” (T-4.III.9-10).

The logic the Course presents addresses so poignantly the absolute truth within; it is virtually irresistible to the mind that seeks the truth. I am constantly, profoundly moved by the simplicity of the Course’s message, as well as it ability to give my analyzing ego mind some compulsory intellectual satisfaction for which it show up and serves; (since ego is the vehicle I have to work with). After all, it is here (ego-belief-mind) where healing takes place, since Heaven is a state of pure wholeness. We make the decision for healing and for Heaven, and the Holy Spirit marshals all forces in Heaven and earth to realign our will with God’s, which of course is our Will as well, being only all that is.
I am overwhelmingly grateful to join allegiance to healing, together as one.

Lesson 148:

My mind holds only what I think with God… When I defend myself I am attacked… Sickness is a defense against the truth…

When read altogether, this reads like:

1. Here we have the truth about my state of being. We are the thoughts of creation God created as His Son. These thoughts have never left the mind that created like Himself. Therefore, this state of being has never left the source for which its healed whole perception can be found; forever one with the eternal and the changeless, the loving and complete. 2. Any thought which seems to have a cause and/or effect that has not these eternal characteristics therefore can only be imagination and not real, being foreign to the Mind of all that is in truth.

3. These foreign thoughts are dreams and when believed to be reality, one identifies oneself with the false effects of a false cause. This is mental illness.

The Course says that all illness is mental illness, and from the perspective of ‘One Cause’, its relatively simple to see that this must be so… All physical characteristics of what we call sickness are the next layer of the denial of Source, to believe instead the impossibility that what is not sourced by God could source a world of all the opposite characteristics to those inherent in Creation; which is changelessly eternal forever.

Here we have the authority problem; up-front and center. It is this desire to be special instead of everything that constitutes the run-down of countless reasons to take a defensive posture toward everything we have now made in our minds.

Coming out of nowhere, this world was sponsored. It is not the truth. It is therefore, impossible to ground in the truth of what one is, as long as the belief that the false is true remains a more real presence to the mind, than the truth. No wonder it always feels like problems such as viruses, cancer, disease, arguments, disagreements, anger and defeat, (ad infinitum) seem to come out of nowhere. I mean, did anyone ever get up one day and say “my plan for today is that everything will go wrong”, yet how often have we said at the end of the day, “ everything went wrong that could have possibly gone wrong. An unreal source sponsors an unpredictable outcome. No wonder constant defense is required to maintain the ‘special status’ this world of nothing promises. These are defenses against the truth.

As long as we constantly occupy our presence of mind with pain-in-the-ass illnesses (and it’s always something, yes) we aren’t available in presence, to remember the truth instead. If the ego can just keep everything in this world coming at us with the ‘last chance, life or death mentality’, and we believe it’s real, we operate from a hectic program of survival mode and are unconscious to the really laughable state of this dream figure’s trials ~we are identified with them instead.

As truth returns to presence of mind by our willingness to see the impossibility of the false, we feel ourselves dis-identifying with the dream figure and its trials. We recognize ourselves as the dreamer of the dream, instead. We laugh, as the course says, when its quaint absurdity is seen. The need for defense is seen as just another aspect of the program of the false-reality, which is meant to dupe the mind of God’s Son into staying asleep and on guard….

Ah, the constant oxymoron of this world… We realize that all defense of the false, attacks the presence of mind and limits what we allow available to know the truth. So why defend, eh? It is only playing a role that separates us from the awareness of our reality. As is sickness… the entire world was made to defend against the truth. And whenever we believe our life depends on defending our little ‘whatever-ness’, it is just a forgiveness opportunity and we are just a little willingness’s reach from total safety and peace, within the mind that already holds only what it thinks with God….

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.~