Only God’s plan for salvation will work.
Holding grievances is an attack on God’s plan for salvation.
To the extent we actually have problems, one of them might be that we insist on looking for salvation where it cannot be found, and thus go on in anguish and suffering when peace and happiness are literally at hand.
What does this mean in practice? It means that we look for salvation in the other – a better partner say. A new spiritual teacher. A job with more money or less responsibility. A body that looks like this rather than that. Running instead of yoga, yoga instead of watching sitcoms. We buy into the body and the world as causes and we start looking for the right one. And then we are lost.
Because there is no “right one” in the world. Salvation is an inside job and it never fails. But we have to remember to look for it. We have to insist on “no more idle seeking” (W-pI.86.2:6).
What we are in truth – which is to say, in Creation – is not separate from God. That is why God’s plan for salvation is in our mind – because our mind is an extension of God’s mind, and “ideas leave not their source” (T-26.VII.4:7).
Yet has God given answer to the world of sickness, which applies to all its forms. God’s answer is eternal, though it works in time, where it is needed. Yet because it is of God, the laws of time do not affect its workings. It is in this world, but not a part of it. For it is real, and dwells where all reality must be (T-26.VII.4:2-6).
That is a lovely description of salvation: and remember, it describes the contents of our mind, because it is the mind we share with God.
Today’s review distinguishes between what we are in truth – the light of the world, blessed Creations of a wholly perfect and loving Creator – and what ego is. Ego has its own agenda, its own plan. Its plan revolves in part around grievances. It’s a grievance collector.
Grievances are attacks on the Holy Instant, on the present, because they cherish the past. Not only are they focused on the past, but they are a perception of the past that insists on seeing only a brother or sister’s errors. Grievances are deeply invested in the self as contained by – forever bound to – a body, struggling and stumbling through a world of pain and confusion, forever in conflict with other bodies.
It is not possible to clear a space for the calm light of grace when we are torn by fear and hatred like this.
Lesson 86 reminds us of that we are called to a form of forgiveness that transcends the limitations of the body and the world. It aims to make the stakes clear. We cannot remember peace and experience joy if we are not vigilant against ego’s habit of getting us to focus on its agenda instead of God’s. And the way it does this is by utilizing grievances. To grieve is to overlook the radiant present in which harm is not possible at all.
Salvation – as our Creator extends it, and as we know it in our shared mind – is present the moment we choose it. Time and space end in that choice. We are not earning anything, or making anything, or traveling to far lands to reclaim something. We aren’t actually on a journey. Salvation is simple because it’s here now. The miracle always returns us to this moment, allowing us to choose again in favor of Love.
The amount of spiritual-seeking-suffering has been suprising to learn of for me. Coming out of the addiction/recovery path, I had so much on my plate that way. The non duality sharers also out of recovery that I ended up learning from after, had seen how identical the search for enlightnemnet addiction was for sufferers who ended up coming to THEM. I sit now helping Paul Hedderman in his Zoom meetings, and see this now. He moved the message out of AA because there he had become a “prophet not heard by his own town”. In creating a website outside of AA, he found non substance abuse addicts coming to hear the relief from identity addiciton. “To the extent we actually have problems” is seen to be a prior obfuscation (while it works). And there can be a dismay still waiting, that the spirituality approached to escape those problems is the original mother problem. It’s like our spiritual/philosophical problem is the “bottom of the well”, churning the surface desirablilities/escape-from-them/problems-unseparate-from-both. When we find that what’s called spirituality and the “top” of human answers/hopes, is the actual bottom, dismay has to be admitted But then the bottom becomes an opening to non-stratified presence. To See the looker for salvation as enough of a Seeing, and not stay in the bottom of the well circling and saying in the dark “there must be more than that”, is the crossing that eye of the needle. The relief on the “other side” of it, has been an amazing priveledge to witness (just like AA’s model of seeing others get sober). And similarly, it remains sobering to see those that quest-ion within the married addictions of time and character identification. That being what salvation is from, the words salvation, enlightenment, awakening all are aprehended from within those addictions. It’s been really interesting to see the hell of conventional addictions, that the world has seen as people needing to be saved from, showing the light of how Mind succeeds where character-idenified (and their world) can only see failure. And to meet up with those that are saving Christianity via ACIM, and those saving ACIM from the same assumption that The Way had come into the world, has been remarkable. Thank you for helping me make clear that there’s a radiant presence, and sharing/shining your graceful calm light in its space.
Spirituality as the mother problem . . . I was helped a lot by ACIM’s emphasis on seeing the external world and its many problems as all the same . . . this baffled me then I saw it clearly and it led to a deep nihilism that I still have not adequately written about. But that’s just the same problem of wrong looking, that is, not looking in the looker.
Have you ever ever read David Bohm’s little essay “The Observer and the Observed?” It turned my head many years ago and remains a touchstone. I think it was Bohm who sort of shook up my intense Christian focus (still my favorite language for this stuff) and got me thinking about oneness/awakening/nonduality as more of a mechanical problem, a cognitive error, a habit of looking in the wrong place kind of error. “IN the looker” is the one place the looker never looks . . .
Anyway, I am interested in what happens when we finally look at the looker and see looking; the Christian framework is a little different than the advaitan one, which tends to be the default for how this gets talked about these days. But maybe that’s more of a technical language problem? Probably. I do like surfing the wordiness.
Hope all is well Mike! Great as always to learn from you.
Love,
Sean
Sean; thanks so much for your spot on brilliant writing on the subject of ACIM. I saved your page and forgot about it. It helped a lot today. You have the gift for the course….
Thanks for the kind words – glad it was helpful and glad you’re here 🙂
Love,
Sean
So many today have fallen into the ego trap of the urtext, or endeavor academy
I truly look forward to corresponding with you and watching more of your videos. You are a great treasure to jesus.