Miracles Principle #25: “Miracles are a part of an interlocking chain of forgiveness which,
when completed, is the Atonement. Atonement works all the time and in all the
dimensions of time.” The word At-one-ment is a synonym for correction—the correction of our
false sense of separation and the recognition of our Oneness with All That Is. God
placed the Holy Spirit in our mind to restore our awareness of our unity with
Him. CIM says our only responsibility is to accept the Atonement for ourselves.
Through choosing the miracle, we are choosing to forgive. As we give, or
for-give, we receive the knowledge of God’s forgiveness, or more accurately,
God’s unconditional love in that God never judged us in the first place. The
Circle of Atonement (Text, Ch. 14, Section V) is an ever-widening circle; we
draw more and more people into it through our forgiveness. The phrase “all the
dimensions of time” reflects the idea of the hologram. In forgiving you, I’m
also forgiving all other people in my life, or in other lives, who have
represented the same problem—the belief in separation and attack.
Lesson 166—“I am entrusted
with the gifts of God.” This lesson encourages us to move forward, past the illusion of
ourselves to the Truth of us. I trust God’s trust in me. What I fear is that
trust in God is treachery. I’m attached to this world I’ve made. To be told my actions, my “sins,” are without
effect is demeaning to my ego. There’s a part of each of us that wants to be a
“tragic” figure. “Behold how nobly I withstand the slings and arrows of my
brother.” (Poor thing, so weary and worn.)
Jesus’
response to this image is: “(Christ) would make you laugh at this perception of
yourself.” Jesus wants me to see the humor of my position, pleading tragedy
when I’ve deliberately chosen to be what I appear to be. When we learn to laugh
at this sorry figure, it just disappears. Who has more chance of being right,
you or God? Perhaps His gifts to us are real. What have we got to lose to find
out? “God’s will does not oppose. It just is.” You’re not fighting with God,
nor is He fighting with you. What
we are fighting is reality itself. Thinking you’re separate from God is about
as rational as a drop of water deciding it’s not in the ocean any more. It’s
like a lion deciding it wants to be a mouse.
The
thrust of CIM is basically threefold: accepting 1) the nature of the true Self;
2) the knowledge of God’s uninterrupted companionship; and and 3)that the
nature we’ve realized/accepted is that of Giver, Lover. To know we have this
gift, we must give it. We must teach by showing “the happiness that comes to
those who feel the touch of Christ.” Our mission is just that: to be happy! To
accept our gifts!
Lesson 167: “ There is one
life, and that I share with God.” God is eternal Life. As a part of God, we are, too.
To cease living would be to separate from God, to become His opposite. Since
God has no opposite, there is no death. That “Ideas leave not their source” is
central to CIM. Ideas don’t exude out from the mind and take on an independent
existence. The idea that thoughts “manifest” in physical form is, ultimately,
not true since there is no physical
form. Death is an idea—an erroneous idea that we can choose to let go of. I am
an idea in God’s Mind. I cannot depart from God’s Mind, live independently of
Him. I can only imagine I’m doing it.
What
is death? Any feeling that is not supremely happy. To be less than perfectly
happy is to assert there is something other than God, something other than
Love. CIM isn’t suggesting we start walking around like a “bliss idiot”—living
in denial of the pain and suffering of our lives and those around us. Rather,
it’s encouraging the opposite. It’s encouraging us to start noticing just how
much the idea of death influences us. It’s inviting us to notice those little
sighs of weariness, those twinges of anxiety, and recognize that the idea of
death underlies them all. They express the idea that separation from God is
real, that something other than God exists, opposing and nullifying His Will.
It’s only when we recognize we’re responsible for those death thoughts that we
can truly understand they have no reality except in our own mind.
Seeing
beyond the illusion can only happen as a result of taking responsibility for
the illusion. Christ is there, in every person, and we are capable of seeing
Him there. You are quite capable, when you choose to do so, of tearing down the
barriers that block your sight. The way to spiritual sight, the way to see
Christ in a brother, is to become aware of all the screens you are throwing up,
all the illusions you’re projecting from your own mind that block true vision.
Paradoxically, you don’t see the Christ within your brother by squinting and
trying to pretend he’s a loving being. You see the Christ in him by looking at
your own mind, your own thoughts, which are the barrier to vision. With the
help of Spirit, you will see that the picture you hold of your brother
originated entirely in your own mind. It’s the sum total of your own judgments
solidified into an opinion. And that is all.
The process of seeing the Christ
within is similar to tuning out static in a radio with electronic filters.
There’s a signal you want to hear, but too much static prevents its being hear.
You identify the static, isolate it, electronically “instruct” your equipment
to ignore it, and the clear signal comes through. You are looking at the ego
and its thoughts of death, identifying them, and deciding to ignore them
because they come from an undependable source.
Lesson 168—“Your grace is
given me. I claim it now.” What is grace? Grace is a gift, always available, awaiting only my
acknowledgment. It’s the movement of love that woos us back to our Source. It’s
the reminder of God’s unspeakable and endless Love, assuaging our guilt and
calling us gently Home. Grace is
everything we need to bring us Home, in whatever form that may take.
Lesson 169—“By grace I live.
By grace I am released.” CIM says grace is “an aspect of the Love of God which is most like the
state prevailing in the unity of truth.” It’s learning to live with full
conscious awareness of Love’s Presence while in the physical world. It’s
learning to see through the illusion to the Truth. Learning doesn’t give us
grace but rather prepares us to receive it. Grace is always there, ready to
pour in. We don’t have to do anything to bring it, but we do have to progress
through (un)learning to remove our unwillingness to receive it. CIM, which is
really unlearning, prepares us to receive grace by loosening the grip of ego on
our minds. We don’t realize the extent to which our minds have been “shut tight
against God’s Voice.” That is what we must learn. “Forgiveness, taught and
learned brings with it” the experience of grace.
Trying
to understand how “what is to come” (enlightenment, awakening, which is in our
future as we perceive it) “is already past” can be fascinating but also confusing
and overwhelming. We’re still in time, so we need to be practical. It’s good to
think about this a little, but to do so is not our main task. Our main task is
forgiveness. Here’s where many CIM students like to bring up the quote from
Course, “I need do nothing.” How do these two things jive? I need do nothing
means I only need to offer the “little willingness” for Spirit to do the work through
me.
Experiences
of grace come and go. We experience being outside of time “but for a little
while.” These experiences, which come in moments of true forgiveness, are all
we need for now. The holy instants, the “little while” of each forgiveness
experience, opens us to miracles. It’s the way miracles flow into our lives,
“to be returned by you from instants you receive, through grace in your
experience, to all who see the light that lingers in your face.” The face of
Christ is your face. It’s my face. It’s the light we bring back into
the world from holy instants. That is our function in the world: to bring a
clear reflection of Heaven’s unity back from the holy instant to bless the
world.
Our
brothers around us in the world, “unknowing, unawakened,” are our own thoughts
in form. They are “a part of you” which “remains outside.” The holy instant is
a moment in which we’re aware of the Oneness. We “come back” to bring the gifts
of grace to that part of our self that is still not awake. To want
Heaven for myself while leaving my brother behind is the “unaskable.” It flies
in the face of what Heaven is: the awareness of Oneness. Some react as if the
mass of humanity is holding them back. Such a thought is based on a
consciousness of separation and is totally alien to Heaven and to grace. The
world you see is not a force separate from you. It’s a reflection of your own
resistance that has yet to be unlearned.
The
world is not outside your mind but in it. Your salvation is the world’s
salvation. They are not two separate things. You save the world by changing
your own mind because that is where the world is, in your mind. And there is
only one mind, only one of us here. When you’re at a movie, if there’s a
problem on the screen, you don’t run to the screen to fix it; you find the
projector and fix that. Those “unenlightened people” you see out there are
parts of your own mind that you haven’t recognized as part of you. You don’t
bring them around, so to speak, by trying to fix them. You do it by working
with the projector, your own mind. This can be perceived as a reason to feel
overpowering guilt, which is what the ego wills, or it can be perceived as the
gift of inalienable freedom, which is God’s will. The choice is ours.
Lesson 170—“There is no
cruelty in God and none in me.” Our attempts at defending ourselves are what make
external attack seem real. We fear because we believe, somewhere deep in our
hearts, that we have attacked and deserve retaliation for our attack. We
believe that “to hurt another brings (us) freedom.” This belief lies beneath
every attack we see as self-defense. But no matter how hard we try to justify
our attacks, something in us knows that our intent is to hurt the other person
because we believe that hurting them will somehow free us from something. In a
nutshell, we believe we’re inherently cruel.
We
project this unacceptable belief onto someone or something external. We see the
attack as coming form outside ourselves, outside our own minds. In reality,
there’s nothing outside our minds. Taken to the extreme, this “worship” of fear
and cruelty ends up being projected onto God Himself; we see Him as a vengeful
God, poised to punish us for our own cruelty. CIM says to lay down our own
defenses is the only way to discover that the
threat isn’t real. We have no reason to fear. We are not cruel; we cannot
be because God Who created us has no cruelty in Him.
The
“god” of fear has no life. It cannot save us. To realize our trusted method of
securing safety is worthless can be a terrifying moment. The missile silos in
which we’ve placed all our trust are pointed at our own hearts.
Lessons 171 and 172 are
reviews.
Assignment: Miracles Principle #26 and
Lessons 173-179. Read Text, Chapter 21, Section II, The Responsibility for
Sight. (The section begins “We have repeated how little is asked of you to
learn this course.)
Practical Application: Pick one brother whom you’ve
not entirely forgiven. His or her name will jump immediately to your mind.
Determine to do daily “work” with
Spirit regarding this brother. Ask daily,
genuinely, to have Spirit have you see this
“disowned” part of your self in a different way.
No comments:
Post a Comment