Category: Forgiveness

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Update

I guess it’s time for an update. Whether or not it’s factually true, the last post I remember leaving here, was of my commitment to the final Lesson of the Holy Spirit: Be Vigilant Only for God and His Kingdom (T-6.V.C., p. 108). That was some time ago.

In the meantime, I have learned many things. I have found my freedom. Judgment is God’s, and He has judged Us as Good. End of story.

Then, there is the Workbook. Lesson 1. Nothing I see…means anything….Lesson 4. These thoughts do not mean anything….Lesson 32. I have invented the world I see. Etc.

That’s freedom. Meanwhile,  Lesson 29. God is in everything I see….because God is in my mind (Lesson 30). That’s the real world, the world you see when (you know) God is in your mind. It’s still an illusion, but it’s a happy dream.

My Amma t-shirt says, “Happiness is a choice.” And Lesson 121 says Forgiveness is the key to happiness. So, forgiveness is a choice. As God’s Son, everything is a choice, except my One Identity in Him.

I could go on and on, quoting the Course, but I won’t. If you’re looking for a way to achieve liberation from the pain and suffering of this separated world, you need look no further. If you continue to study it, you will realize the Self. And, you will have a thorough and complete guide for living the happy dream on Earth.

If you have any questions, please ask them. And, maybe I’ll write some more.

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For the Love

It’s been a long time since I wrote anything here. I left off with being vigilant only for God and His Kingdom, which meant handing my mind over to Jesus. I let go of a lot of things, but I retained a few practices that have been serving me well for some time. I have Scoliosis and have been doing http://www.somaticmovementcenter.com exercises for about three years, and I kept that up, as well as self-massage with Ayurvedic oils, which has solved my dry skin problem. And, in the last month, since moving to http://www.panorama.org, I’ve been lap-swimming every other day. So, I’m now doing the massage and scoliosis exercises on the days I don’t swim. I was encouraged to swim by 1) my own guidance, and 2) the book Deep Fitness by Philip Shepherd and Andrei Yakovenko. The research has proven that physical strength is the greatest determinant of overall well being for elders.

In May, my wife saw that interest rates were about to rise and decided to put our 1903 Portland house on the market a month earlier than we’d planned. Because we’ readied it for sale the previous fall and had lived in the basement BnB since then, there was little work to do before putting it on the market, and it sold in two days. So, we were able to move into our new home June 1st, opening day. We’ve worked hard all our lives, so living at Panorama is an incredible experience. Everything but housekeeping is done for us and the amenities are amazing. It’s a very laid back community of elders! We have a 250-seat auditorium/theatre that is just a 1/2 block from our home, and an aquatic/fitness center just another 1/4 block farther. We’re near the center of pretty much all the community events.

With help from my son and a friend, we packed a 16 x 8 x 8 ft Pod and shipped that off in mid-May, and then rented a 15 ft U-Haul for the rest, filling the middle with Karen’s potted plants. We drove up June 1st and unloaded the truck that afternoon so we could turn it in the next morning. The Pod arrived a week later and we had a week to unload that. So, we did everything ourselves, which is pretty unusual for folks here, but it felt great, just like it had to do so much of the rehab on our Portland house as we got it ready for sale. And, now we can just relax, and we’re letting that sink in.

I’m taking forgiveness to the next level: I’m eliminating contention from my life. Before I moved, I’d cut my ties to partisan groups and was only engaged with neutral/bipartisan not-for-profit organizations. But, since moving here, I’ve cut my ties to everything political and most organizations that are involved in conflict of any kind. The only ones I’m still involved with are doing remarkable, radical projects that are cooperative and non-conflictual, and I’m mostly supporting individuals whose work I admire and am learning from. I guess you could say, I’ve eliminated a lot of the shoulds that still had a bit of guilt at their foundations. And, I’ve become quite vigilant for critical thoughts directed at anyone, including myself. This is giving me a deeper feeling of relaxation in social situations than I’ve ever known before. I’m at peace with the way things are, and I know that matters more than anything else in this world.

I never understood this before. I thought non-partisan people were afraid to take a stand. You know, like they were tacitly supporting the status quo, despite its obvious faults, because they didn’t want to make waves or engage in unnecessary conflict. This is an especially big issue right now, as the world is deeply divided. But, I finally know and feel deeply how important it is to hold to the truth within and not take sides; to support each and every individual, in their spirit, without feeling compelled to support their chosen courses. I am here for the love, which is at the heart of everyone and everything.

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The Healing Power of Playfulness

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! I got up at 3:50 AM on purpose this morning to watch a live podcast, hosted by Wanako Oberhuber of The Holy Spirit’s Curriculum of Joy. He was interviewing Vicki Thomas Poppe, whose husband Ted Poppe, Jr. recently went through transition. That lasted an hour and a half, and then I watched the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Dublin, Ireland.

It was a very unusual morning for me. I’m in the habit of transferring directly from the bed to my meditation chair, and after half an hour or so, giving myself an Ayurvedic oil massage, followed by an hour of somatic movement exercises while the oil soaks in, and then a shower and breakfast. And I don’t usually get up that early. So, today was really different!

I think breaking my routine every now and then is really good for me. It made me more present to what was happening right here and now. With a Virgo Moon, I’m a pattern-maker. But my Moon is square Uranus, the change-agent, and opposite my Mars in Pisces, the empath. And, of course, Vicki is a great speaker and knows A Course in Miracles very well. She’s been involved in a lot of its history. So, while she was speaking, I looked up some of the events she referred to.

Gary Renard and Dr. Ken Wapnick were involved and had things to say about those events, too. There was conflict and sides were taken and noted. Another of my main patterns is my Sun in Aries opposite my Neptune in Libra and square Saturn in Cancer. As they were my teachers of the Course, I’d taken their sides and still do. But, Ted was on the other side. He may have had a personality disorder during that time but, after his second awakening and getting back with Vicki, he made amends to 20,000 people and was a really amicable guy.

So, Vicki’s and Wanako’s conversation transformed into a discussion of playfulness, after she got him to talk about his Master’s thesis in Cultural Anthropology, in which he documented kite-flying and volleyball behaviors as a participant-observer on an Austrian island set aside for playfulness. Vicki noted the ever-present element of playfulness in her husband’s oppositional-defiant behavior, which seems to be a quality of the T-square that I have recognized as a participant-observer in my own life.

Although this behavior is often calculated to upset the symbols of the status quo, it often has the element of fun in it. The Yippies were an excellent example of this exposing the emperor has no clothes phenomenon among the governing elites. As we have seen, they usually fail to see the humor in the situation and often strike out blindly, like Nixon with his War on Drugs or Obama et al v. Julian Assange, etc.

My takeaway is that, whenever there is conflict in the world, the ego is involved–on both sides. To the ego, mistakes are really serious. They’re called sins, which trigger guilt, fear, and punishment. So, the ego leaves a blatantly obvious trail of tears in its wake. But, our split mind has another half, which is the Holy Spirit–the Memory of God. He sees right through the illusion and knows that errors are not real. His response: “Silly dream (gentle laughter),” which is our cue to forgiveness. And, the result is peace.

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Let’s Put an End to War

Perception derives its meaning from relationships. Those you accept are the foundations of your beliefs. The separation is merely another term for a split mind. The ego is the symbol of separation, just as the Holy Spirit is the symbol of peace. What you perceive in others you are strengthening in yourself. You may let your mind misperceive, but the Holy Spirit lets your mind reinterpret its own misperceptions.

A Course in Miracles-Text, Chp 5, Sec III, P 9

If you look at world history, you will find war after war, injustice, theft, murder, rape, treachery, etc. This is the ego’s world, written by the victors, and based on separation, individuality, and specialness. It is a battleground–“one or the other” – “kill or be killed.” All of us are the inheritors of this insane world. It is in our genetic makeup and none of us has not been raised on the idea that error is real (serious) with the resulting belief in sin-guilt-fear and scarcity. As long as we perceive such a world we will be complicit in its cause, whether our bodies are in the fray or not, because our bodies are neutral and cause is in the mind.

We may find this idea reprehensible and judge ourselves as only the ego knows how. Most likely, though, we will repress the thought of our own sin, guilt and fear, and project it out onto socially sanctioned perpetrators, victims of our special need to be right, and socially acceptable. And, this is the cycle that perpetuates the ego’s world: choosing sides, victims of our wrath, vilifying and punishing them, sowing the seeds for the next crime until it feels like we are all prisoners in a merciless world that will destroy us all in the end.

The other half our spit mind, however, sees an entirely different relationship in which we are all One. In the Holy Spirit’s vision error is not real and we have never left Our Source. The memory of God is still in our minds, even though “the ego does not recognize it. The Holy Spirit recognizes it perfectly because it is His Own dwelling place; the place in the mind where He is at home. You are at home there, too, because it is a place of peace, and peace is of God. You who are part of God are not at home except in His peace. If peace is eternal, you are at home only in eternity (T-5.III.10.4-8).”

The Holy Spirit is God’s Answer to the separation idea. Although we could never have really left God, when we imagined that we had, God placed His Memory in our split mind so that, when we awakened from the “silly dream” of separation, we could choose Him as our teacher and find our way back to God. The foundation for the “real world” is the Atonement, which is the realization that we have never left our Source. With that foundation, the world is transformed into a “happy dream”.

You might wonder how we can escape the ego’s nightmarish prison for the Holy Spirit’s “real world.” Our belief in space and time is deeply embedded in our psyche, but it is held fast by our addiction to the ego’s thought system of sin, guilt and fear. When we choose the Holy Spirit as our teacher, the world become a classroom in which we replace all of that with the recognition that scarcity is a silly dream in a rea world of abundance.

Instead of all that judgment and condemnation, the Holy Spirit (or Jesus) tells us that our only function is forgiveness. He asks us to be vigilant in our minds for separation thoughts, and to look at each one with Him. Realizing that we are each a part of God’s One Son and have no meaning apart from God, we learn to hold each thought of sin, guilt and fear in the Light of Christ and watch it disappear.

These thoughts have feelings and I hold them in my Heart until they are gone. By doing this I accept responsibility for the fact that they are in my mind, know I am determined to be rid of them, and feel them until they are gone and peace returns to my mind. Sometimes, they return–because I think them again. And, I take them into my Heart and feel them until they’re gone. If it’s a really persistent belief, it will take awhile. I once had anger that was so persistent that it took a month until the bottom dropped out and “I” fell into a deep sadness.

The sadness was completely irrational, but I didn’t have to tie it to a story and strengthen it in my mind. All I had to do was look at it with the Holy Spirit. So, I continued the practice with the sadness, just holding it in my Heart awareness until it went away. Finally, after three weeks of persistent application, the sadness dropped out and I fell into the Heart of Love. I knew instantly that it was the Self, our true Identity.

Forgiveness is the Way Home. But, we first have to recognize that the cause of our pain and suffering is in our own minds. We have to stop judging and condemning others, with the understanding that there really are no others, no separation, and the ego and its world is just an illusion. No one that appears to be outside us is responsible for any thoughts in our minds. As we learned in kindergarten (hopefully) we have to mind our own business (MYOB), and that business is to forgive the thoughts of separation in our minds.

Then, I guarantee you, your mind will be healed, you will have true perception (vision), your relationships will be holy, and your dream will be happy. It’s called the Atonement, and that is how we put an end to war.