Reflections 197 to 210
8th February 2024
His the eyes that look past error to the Christ in you. (ACIM, S-2.I.6:8)
***
Ref: Oneness and sickness cannot coexist. God’s teachers choose to look on dreams a while. It is a conscious choice. For they have learned that all choices are made consciously, with full awareness of their consequences. (ACIM, M-12.6:1-4)
There is love and there is fear.
Love permeates everything and fear is just an abstract thought. We only have to spend a small moment of introspection to know that fear tends to dominate our minds.
A Course in Miracles tells us that God is Love, and Love has no opposite. The Father created the Son, and the Father and Son are joined as One. Heaven is the realm wherein we find this perfect oneness.
Heaven might be equated to the top of a mountain. At its base is hell, where fear dominates. Here, eight billion of us doubt that love can ever be found. In hell, fear is endemic and sickness rife.
Jesus made his way to the summit, as have many other Teachers. We are following in their wake.
There are thousand of paths, and thousands upon thousands of footsteps, but we have to tread diligently for ourselves. Love is what guides us. Quite simply, it is only love that shines the way.
Janet Tarantino was told that “love is the only thing that matters” as she returned from her third near-death experience. She knows that only a thin veil separates us from the light. And she also says that endless joy greets us, not only on the summit but also over on what is known as the other side.
____________________________________________________________________________
9th February 2024
Ask, then, His help, and ask Him how to learn forgiveness as His vision lets it be. (ACIM, S-2.I.7:1)
***
Ref: Here is His home, for here there is need of Him indeed. He brings the ending of the world with Him. It is His Call God’s teachers answer, turning to Him in silence to receive His Word. (ACIM, M-14.2:5-7)
A Course in Miracles tells us that the world will end when the single thought that gave rise to it has disappeared.
Another way of putting it is that what has no beginning has no end. The world simply arose from a senseless dream.
And the dream, like all dreams, just fades away as we awaken from our slumbers. It is inevitable, then, that we are going to end all attachment a world that never was.
It also means that what A Course in Miracles labels ‘forgiveness’ is taking place within this dream. Forgiveness is an illusory act that turns a nightmare into a fantasy.
Forgiveness allows the thought of love to replace the thought of fear. It withdraws us from a dream of pain and enters us into a dream of peace.
Meanwhile, the ‘Him’ referred to at the top of the page is the help that is given us. The Holy Spirit waits quietly for a sign to act.
Our job is to ask, and help is given us. The Holy Spirit takes all our darkness and makes it into light.
We have to live A Course in Miracles like we mean it. The world just ends as night turns to day.
____________________________________________________________________________
199/ That Guilty Thought
10th February 2024
You are in need of what He gives, and your salvation rests on learning this of Him. (ACIM, S-2.I.7:2)
***
Ref: Accept as true only what your brother is, if you would know yourself. Perceive what he is not and you cannot know what you are, because you see him falsely. (ACIM, T-9.IV.1:4-5)
A Course in Miracles tells us that we all have a part to play in the Atonement, but the plan for the Atonement is totally beyond our comprehension.
This is hard for the ego to accept. The ego needs to understand.
Also, and since the Atonement is the correction of error, the ego has no idea that it is the error.
A Course in Miracles also states that to forgive is to overlook. This means overlooking everything.
To overlook everything is completely foreign to the ego’s way of thinking. The ego loves to analyse, control and correct. It cherishes guilt and doesn’t know what forgiveness is.
The ego is a guilty thought that lives in the mind alongside a Thought that knows of our innocence. The ego and the Holy Spirit are completely unrelated and cannot co-exist.
The thought of the ego totally negates the Thought of the Holy Spirit. Even the tiniest tingle of fear means we have lost that silent Presence.
We either hurt ourselves or heal ourselves. We either suffer or we are completely at peace.
The Atonement simply means we’ve got rid of the ego. Gone from the mind is that guilty thought.
11th February 2024
Prayer cannot be released to Heaven while forgiveness-to-destroy remains with you. (ACIM, S-2.I.7:3)
***
Ref: Holy are you, eternal, free and whole, at peace forever in the Heart of God. Where is the world, and where is sorrow now? (ACIM, M-15.1:11-12)
This is God’s Judgement on His Son.
It shows us where our freedom lies, but as spirit and not as flesh.
It is a statement that tells us what we really are instead of what we think we are.
Forgiveness-to-destroy is the process that stops us knowing this. It keeps us in the world, shapes us as a body, and confines us to a prison cell of our own making.
A Course in Miracles teaches us forgiveness-for-salvation. This allows us to understand that we’ve never been in the world, nor in a body. We are forgiving ourselves for thinking that we have.
It’s therefore a process of removing all our limitations and allowing them to simply float away.
And it is then we discover that we have never left the Heart of God. We just think we have.
Forgiveness-to-destroy sees the self as limited and weak, and confined by restrictions. We learn that we are not real at all. We are just series of images that make up this picture that we know as ourself.
The Self is what we are. The Self is the Son of God, whole, pure and innocent. Forgiveness-for-salvation shows us exactly what we believe we’re not.
____________________________________________________________________________
201/ An Idea Becomes a Fact
12th February 2024
God’s mercy would remove this withering and poisoned thinking from your holy mind. (ACIM, S-2.I.7:4)
***
Ref: You have so little faith in yourself because you are unwilling to accept the fact that perfect love is in you. And so you seek without for what you cannot find without. (ACIM, T-15.VI.2:1-2)
Perfect faith equals perfect love. This is a fact.
Giving and receiving are also the same. We have no limits and no lack. Only our belief in separate interests makes it appear that we have.
A Course in Miracles’ whole purpose is to remove the blocks to love’s presence. We stop feeling apart and start becoming whole.
We can’t know our wholeness if we identify with a body, and sharing has little meaning in a world of scarcity. There are rich and there are poor, deserving and not deserving.
We take our bodies very seriously and endeavour to establish our own little world within the world. We find it impossible to believe that we are just an idea.
A Course in Miracles states that we have made ourselves up, just as we made the world up. God is now an abstract thought. To know our wholeness completely, we need to have the experience.
An experience of wholeness removes our sense of self. We stop identifying as a body with a name and a history. We start becoming our true, authentic Self, full of limitless love and endless potential.
We return back to our state of oneness. What was once just an idea has now become a fact.
____________________________________________________________________________
202/ Follow the Prompts
13th February 2024
Christ has forgiven you, and in His sight the world becomes as holy as Himself. (ACIM, S-2.I.7:5)
***
Ref: Never forget that the Sonship is your salvation, for the Sonship is your Self. As God’s creation It is yours, and belonging to you It is His. (ACIM, T-11.IV.1:1-2)
A Course in Miracles tells us there is no distinction between within and without. We are one Self with no boundaries and no barriers.
To fully understand this, we need to learn what salvation is. Essentially, this means undoing our shared belief in separation.
And we also need to know that, if we hate anything or anyone, then salvation becomes impossible. We are looking on what God created without love.
Therefore, three things need to be understood, and understood well. These are:
- We cannot enter God’s Presence if we attack His Son. This means, the Self that we are.
- All blame has to be totally undone. If we blame others, we are blaming ourselves.
- Peace lies only in its limitless. If we don’t know peace, then we do not know our Self.
Forgiveness, then, becomes our primary tool in which we return our minds to the Mind of God. It is a foolproof system that allows us to fully comprehend that salvation is always our responsibility.
All we have to do is to follow the prompts. The Holy Spirit uses these prompts to guide us Home.
____________________________________________________________________________
203/ We Think We Think
14th February 2024
Who sees no evil in it sees like Him. (ACIM, S-2.I.7:6)
***
Ref: My holiness is my salvation. (ACIM, W-39)
The thoughts we think we think tell us that we are not holy. It’s an imagined series of thoughts because the mind is blank. It isn’t really thinking about anything.
The ego, our very own sense of alienation and abandonment, makes up these thoughts. The ego is also an illusory concept that has no reality in truth.
Everything that we think we think - everything that makes our lives easier or more difficult - is just a fantasy. We are dreaming a dream that can change in a moment from being happy to sad.
In Hebrew, the term ‘holy’ is known as kodesh and is used to convey a sense of separation. To become whole and complete is therefore our purpose in this dream that we call life.
We learn to see no evil in the world, just as Jesus did two thousand years ago. However, in the context of A Course in Miracles, we are all the Christ, the one Son of God.
We therefore either forgive ourselves and make a heaven on earth, or we continue to crucify each other and make a hell. There is only love and fear.
We think we think, but we don’t. If the workbook lesson above tells us that holiness is our salvation, the next one reminds us that we are blessed as a Son of God (ACIM, W-40).
Nothing can stop us if we stick to the plan. The plan is a return to holiness, and this means being wholly connected to the Mind of God.
____________________________________________________________________________
204/ Near-death Wisdom
15th February 2024
For what He has forgiven has not sinned, and guilt can be no more. Salvation’s plan is made complete, and sanity has come. (ACIM, S-2.I.7:7-8)
***
Ref: The path becomes quite different as one goes along. Nor could all the magnificence, the grandeur of the scene and the enormous opening vistas that rise to meet one as the journey continues, be foretold from the outset. (ACIM, M-19.2:5-6)
Wholeness is immortal. Only separate fragments decay and die.
This is not what science teaches in school, nor what we learn in divinity. However, it makes sense. Any mind that is unclouded by judgement will know that it is true.
Life changes as we go along. What we consider good and bad can alter dramatically. We look at life totally differently when we are young and when we are old.
The near-death experience almost mirrors everything that is quoted at the top of this reflection. All experiencers talk of leaving the pain of the world behind, like it was never there.
And, on the other side, we are surrounded by what makes us feel safe. Love knows our needs
The fact is, we can have this too, on earth, if we learn to forgive truly. It is called the real world.
Dr. Laurin Bellg is a critical care physician who first questioned her scientific thinking when, in 1996, a patient told her of an out-of-body experience. In the video below, she discusses further detailed accounts, highlighting a topic that many of her medical colleagues would prefer to avoid.
____________________________________________________________________________
16th February 2024
Forgiveness is the call to sanity, for who but the insane would look on sin when he could see the face of Christ instead? (ACIM, S-2.I.8:1)
***
Ref: God’s peace can never come where anger is, for anger must deny that peace exists. Who sees anger as justified in any way or any circumstance proclaims that peace is meaningless, and must believe that it cannot exist. (ACIM, M-20.3:3-4)
A Course in Miracles tells us that we made death. Death is simply an illusion of an end.
Life has no opposite because life is God, and nothing that God created can ever have an end.
The Will of God is God’s gift to us. The Will of God is all there is.
And peace is the condition of God’s Will. If we attain complete peace, then we remember God.
Learning to fully understand any and all of the above usually depends on these three factors.
Firstly, it’s likely that we have suffered badly. All the solutions that we have sought have met a dead end. We now want peace so intensely that nothing is going to stop us from finding it.
Secondly, the words of A Course in Miracles have to speak to us. They must resonate so strongly that our internal narrative (the ego) can never stop us from learning its teachings.
And thirdly, we learn true forgiveness. We need to see that nothing else can give us what we want.
Death is not the solution; life is. When we learn forgiveness properly, our will becomes one of peace.
____________________________________________________________________________
206/ Choice for Life
17th February 2024
This is the choice you make; the simplest one, and yet the only one that you can make. (ACIM, S-2.I.8:2)
***
Ref: This simple courtesy is all the Holy Spirit asks of you. Let truth be what it is. Do not intrude upon it, do not attack it, do not interrupt its coming. Let it encompass every situation and bring you peace. (ACIM, T-17.VIII.2:1-4)
The choice that is mentioned above is always about forgiveness. By not forgiving, we choose the ego instead of the Holy Spirit.
Having a simple courtesy, also mentioned above, simply refers to the holy instant. Without the holy instant, we live in the past or the future and it is only there that our suffering lies.
A Course in Miracles only asks that our faithlessness be replaced by faith. It wants us to become more trusting in what is really here.
Our minds have become like dark clouds of fantasy that drift across an open sky. Each cloud contains billions of thoughts and we select only those that are most relevant to our own particular situation.
We become transfixed with thinking but can never relax into the clarity that’s always within us.
It’s a clarity that brings us total freedom and joy. It’s as if we are stepping into the open sky.
And only puffs of nothingness obscure the truth. What is open and expansive is always there.
Forgiveness undoes the ego; the holy instant imbues us with the Holy Spirit. Together they combine as a beautiful choice for life.
____________________________________________________________________________
207/ Finding Stillness
18th February 2024
God calls on you to save His Son from death by offering Christ’s Love to him. This is your need, and God holds out this gift to you. (ACIM, S-2.I.8:3-4)
***
Ref: Strictly speaking, words play no part at all in healing. The motivating factor is prayer, or asking. What you ask for you receive. But this refers to the prayer of the heart, not to the words you use in praying. (ACIM, M-21.1:1-4)
A Course in Miracles tells us that every special relationship is a substitute for God’s Will. We decide on what we need and we do this because we feel separate and alone.
The ego (our sense of aloneness) needs special relationships in order to achieve the credibility that it craves. The ego needs fulfilment and recognition. It can only love if it gets love in return.
However, we might not realize that we can also make our relationships holy.
The holy relationship has not one ounce of denial. Love is always given and received. It is always a relationship that has God’s Voice at its centre. The Holy Spirit always tells us what to do.
Within us all is a yearning that needs no words. It is our direct connection to God and comes through the Holy Spirit. It is really a memory of our own perfection.
Our words, our thoughts and our prayers need to arise through this yearning. It is the only way to have a true relationship of love.
Truth calls to us constantly. We just need to be still enough to hear its call.
And our relationships are part of this stillness. Only in stillness can the Love of God begin to flow.
____________________________________________________________________________
208/ Cartoon Characters
19th February 2024
As He would give, so must you give as well. And thus is prayer restored to formlessness, beyond all limits into timelessness, with nothing of the past to hold it back from reuniting with the ceaseless song that all creation sings unto its God. (ACIM, S-2.I.8:5-6)
***
Ref: Atonement is the Word of God. Accept His Word and what remains to make salvation possible? Accept His Word and every miracle has been accomplished. To forgive is to heal. (ACIM, M-22.1:6-9)
The Song of Prayer is the ceaseless song that we sing to the Creator, and the Creator sings to us.
Atonement enables us to hear it because all minds are made one. We are given it. However, we also have to accept the Atonement for ourselves.
God, Who only Is, now has no opposite. There is only Him and His Son.
Everything we do, or even don’t do, is the path to healing. It is our salvation. However, our actions arise from a character that doesn’t exist. We take ourselves far too seriously.
Really, we are just cartoon characters playing very silly roles. It probably makes all those watching (Jesus, Buddha, enlightened beings…) roar with laughter. They know that it isn’t really happening.
Except, as the dream dreams us, we get caught up within it. We are the characters. We can be no one else.
We need to undo all our guilt, and we do this only with the Holy Spirit’s help. We bring all our darkness (our pain) to the light (true forgiveness). We look at it all with absolutely no judgement.
Cartoon characters cannot accept the Atonement. Salvation is when God’s Peace is always shared.
____________________________________________________________________________
209/ Perfect Peace
20th February 2024
But to achieve this end you first must learn, before you reach where learning cannot go. (ACIM, S-2.I.9:1)
***
Ref: No one can escape from illusions unless he looks at them, for not looking is the way they are protected. There is no need to shrink from illusions, for they cannot be dangerous. (ACIM, T-11.V.1:1-2)
Healing is the removal of all that stands in the way of knowledge.
Any pain, any suffering, any trauma - we need to look at it all directly. However, the ‘we’ that looks is an awareness. Our awareness then joins with the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is a constant truth; it is love, light and joy. The ego is delusion; it is pain and suffering.
The test for anything is perfect peace. It is impossible for the ego to know perfect peace; for the Holy Spirit, it is all it knows.
We therefore have two thought systems that we can use. We have the thought system of the ego and the thought system of the Holy Spirit.
If we just spend a little time listening to the thought system of the ego, we would acknowledge how it bombards us with negativity. It tears us down and never gives us a moment’s peace.
To listen to the thought system of the Holy Spirit, we just need to go into silence. Out of this silence arises the perfect thoughts.
A Course in Miracles takes us away from our madness and leads us towards that perfect peace.
____________________________________________________________________________
210/ True Forgiveness
21st February 2024
Forgiveness is the key, but who can use a key when he has lost the door for which the key was made, and where alone it fits? (ACIM, S-2.I.9:2)
***
Ref: Make way for love, which you did not create, but which you can extend. On earth this means forgive your brother, that the darkness may be lifted from your mind. (ACIM, T-29.III.4:1-2)
A Course in Miracles tells us that we cannot wake ourselves, but we can let ourselves be wakened.
We do this by forgiving our brother of his dreams. We do this so that all illusions can disappear and what remains is a shining light.
This is the shining light of Christ and is actually what we are. And to know this is the whole purpose of A Course in Miracles summed up in a nutshell.
If we forgive truly, then it is impossible that there can be anything else. Only God’s Son remains.
It may seem like a fantasy, especially when we are projecting so much nonsense onto so many people, but it is Jesus’ continual message on every page.
By undoing all our guilt through forgiveness and by allowing the mind to become incredibly still, all illusions disappear and only reality remains.
We have removed the veil to truth and there is nothing that can prevent us from knowing exactly what we are. It is like switching on a light in a darkened room.
Everything revolves around forgiveness. When we get this right, then all the pain of the world just falls away and all the peace of the mind floods in to replace it.
Comments
Post a Comment