Forgiveness Is Not A Reaction

We all know that forgiveness is a big part of A Course in Miracles. Yet understanding just what forgiveness means is difficult. Even after we figure out the course definition – it’s more like right seeing as opposed to pardoning somebody – we are still caught in the question of how to apply it. I want to suggest that we need to relate to forgiveness more as followers than actors. In other words, we aren’t doing forgiveness – forgiveness is doing us.

When I first began to study ACIM, I appreciated its focus on forgiveness. It felt deeply Christian to me. It made me think about turning the other cheek, giving away my shirt and my jacket, and all of that. It was Jesus being crucified and forgiving those who had nailed him to the cross. To forgive was to love radically in the spirit of Jesus Christ.

Yet fairly quickly, that traditional understanding was undone by the course.

To forgive is to overlook. Look, then, beyond error and do not let your perception rest upon it, for you will believe what your perception holds (T-9.IV.1:2-3).

And later in the same section, this idea is expanded upon, with special emphasis on not allowing error to become real. The ego’s plan for forgiveness is to always make the error real – painfully, visibly, tangibly real – and only then proceed to pardon it. Egoic forgiveness is always conditional. The course has a different view.

Forgiveness through the Holy Spirit lies simply in looking beyond error from the beginning, and thus keeping it unreal for you. Do not let any belief in its realness enter your mind . . . What has no effect does not exist, and to the Holy Spirit the effects of error are nonexistent (T-9.IV.5:3-5).

So forgiveness is not a reaction. It is not a response. We really have to get clear on this if we want to make it a practice, to reap its healing benefits. As soon as we perceive error of any kind, we are not in the space of forgiveness. The forgiveness contemplated by the course does not see error, period. As soon as we perceive any error – the kids are too loud, the weather is crappy, our partner is griping too much, the Democrats/Republicans are being idiotic, there’s too much war, everyone’s a faker but me, take your pick – then we’ve left forgiveness.

Forgiveness does not take a bad situation and make it right. It’s not a tool that we use to rectify an otherwise broken situation. It is not a response to a problem. Rather, it is the perception of the complete and unconditional absence of conflict.

For many years, I accepted intellectually the ACIM concept of forgiveness. It only takes a little effort to grasp and then we can parrot it to no end. But that kind of learning is meaningless. At the deeper levels we are still invested in error. The error – the sin – remains central. I had the right idea, but I was still functioning with a this-is-right-this-is-wrong mindset.

Remember always that ego doesn’t mind the course as an idea. Not at all. It’s the application – the attempt to make it real in our lives – that causes us problems. It is happy to concede a definition so long as it remains an academic exercise.

So I began to see that I had no idea what forgiveness was. Left to my brain and my body senses, and all the conditioning that goes along with that, I was always going to be stuck in the dual thought system or right and wrong. To be stuck that way was to be bereft of forgiveness and whatever peace and joy attended it. So something else had to come into play.

I always say that if you aren’t feeling battered by the course then you probably aren’t doing it seriously. Real honesty and real willingness are almost always experienced as painful. To believe otherwise is to believe that the egoic self is cheerfully participating in its demise. It’s not. It’s fighting tooth and nail. So even though I felt embarrassed at having misunderstood this important concept, and discouraged at how much farther I had to go, and so on and so forth, it was fundamentally a healthy moment. Seeing the futile resources of the egoic self means that we are at last open – even if just a crack – to the creative action of the Holy Spirit.

We really have to accept that we are students. We really have to want to learn and we can only learn when we see how little we know. It is a humbling experience.

Miracles are merely the sign of your willingness to follow the Holy Spirit’s plan of salvation, recognizing that you do not understand what it is. His work is not your function, and unless you accept this you cannot learn what your function is (T-9.IV.6:3-4).

So we don’t do forgiveness. The Holy Spirit does. We have to stand aside and let the Holy Spirit do its work. This can be confusing – after all, if we aren’t separate from the Holy Spirit, then what exactly does it mean to step aside?

I say: don’t sweat it. Just keep in mind that what you’ve brought to bear so far hasn’t worked. Trust that there’s another way. Pray or meditate if that helps. Go for long walks. When you run into conflict, don’t struggle with your perception. Just watch how it plays out in your mind. Be attentive. For me, attention and willingness go a long way. Sooner or later, they make possible what seemed otherwise impossible: I have the experience of forgiveness. I feel the deep peace that naturally accompanies the realization of oneness. It’s vibrant and energetic.

And it fades – or I cling to it and so it disappears. Or it seems to. Yet a little taste will carry you a long way. And the next sip is almost always closer than you think. A moment of clarity, a few minutes of revelation, an abiding insight, a calm certainty. We are never as far from God as we believe. To know this is to forgive.

Question Your Separation from God

The separation is the starting point. It is the beginning. We believe that we are separated from God. It is an old problem, an old belief, and it gave rise to religion and all other sorts of thought systems and beliefs. We are always struggling with the self that we think we are – the egoic self, the false self, the human-made self – and the self that remains as God created it – eternal, unified and free.

A Course in Miracles teaches us that the Separation never happened. There was no fall from grace. We never left the garden. The idea that we could somehow somewhere be separate from our Creator was both tiny and mad. All we had to do was laugh at it. But by taking it seriously, we gave the separation credence. And given the power of our minds – which create as they were created, fully like to their Creator – the separation became real. This world, these bodies, these personalities.

Can we accept that it is all an illusion? If we could, then we would remember. We are still as God created us. We have not left our home. Heaven is not a place, attained after virtuous sojourning through a material world, but a state that is accessible to us now. Do we know it? Are we willing to know it? It is without conditions. It is contingent on nothing but our readiness to accept it.

Every lesson, every sentence of A Course in Miracles wants to assure us that what we think happened – the break from God – did not happen. Period. And if it did not happen, then it is not real, and it has no effects. No scarcity, no sin, no loneliness, no guilt, no fear, no anger. The egoic self says, “it sounds nice but you know it’s not how the world works.” The egoic self says, “it’s just a metaphor. Don’t take it literally.”

The egoic self wants us to believe that we broke from God in the past and can heal that break in the future. It is perfectly happy to allow for self-improvement. It uses the past and future as a sort of hammer and anvil with which to crush the present – render it a blip between the two periods of time in which we are utterly powerless, in which everything is meaningless.

God, through the Holy Spirit, calls to us now. It would restore our fullness – our sanity – this instant forever. That is the promise of A Course in Miracles. And yet we go on with half-measures. We listen to Holiness with one ear and give the other to hell.

The lives we think we live are based on wrong ideas, wrong thinking and resistance to the help that is always present. No wonder we ache. No wonder we are ever in touch with our brokenness. We own the lie for fear of Truth. And all we need to do is say, “okay. My way is not working. I am ready to try yours.” The Holy Spirit is aflame in the tiny gap created by willingness. Jesus walks beside us. So does the Buddha, so does Guru Nanak. We are not alone. We are not inventing spiritual wheels.

Every time I think I get it – every time I think I’ve given it over – I learn there is a little more. More sludge and cruft that needs healing. More shadows in need of the soft light of Christ. Is this what Jesus meant, so many years ago, when he said “you will not get out until you have paid the last penny?” It’s not a threat – not a condition as the world knows conditions – but a promise. Give it all over. All. And when we do . . . “Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in Heaven.”

We have to question the separation. We start there – with questioning, with healing. It is either real or it is not. The miracle teaches us it never happened. The miracle says it’s okay to breathe: we’re home.

You Can End Your Separation from God Now

If God is, and we are not experiencing God, then we have interjected something between ourselves and God. It is not an object though it may certainly appear that way. It is simply the idea that we can be separated from God. That is all. If we can liberate ourselves from the tyranny of that one idea, then we will know the peace and joy of God.

And yes, I know. Easy to say, hard to do.

But that is the promise of A Course in Miracles! And it is backed up by a curriculum that will assist us in the necessary liberation. The hard part is letting go of the world and turning inward. That interior landscape – of ideas, of images, of fantasies – can seem unwieldy indeed! Yet it is only there that meaningful help can come. And it is there that the necessary undoing will be accomplished – in us and through us, but not by us. Not like that.

When I say let go of the world, I mean only to withdraw one’s investment in it. To let go of the idea that external circumstances can be the cause of anything. The Course does not advocate asceticism. You don’t have to swear off cheesecake, do yoga three hours a day and Tantric meditation the other twenty-one. Sackcloth and ashes are not required. You are allowed to live your life in the world.

You are simply asked to consider seeing that life a little differently.

How does this work? We allow the Holy Spirit to see for us. We allow the Holy Spirit to offer guidance – where to go, what to say, who to see. Don’t complicate this. Don’t make it so metaphysical and abstract that you can’t decide whether to brush your teeth or not. The Holy Spirit is just that part of your mind that remembers God. The ego is a way of thinking without God; the Holy Spirit thinks with God. It’s a gift and it was given to you. More than that, it was given to you to be used.

So use it! Find a way to make this possible.

I’m a word guy. I talk a lot and I write a lot. So I believe in talking to God, talking to Jesus, talking to the late Tara Singh, who is my teacher, talking to the Holy Spirit. I ask for a lot help. And the help comes.

And I am here to tell you that as time passes, and as my faith and my practice deepen, the help doesn’t leave. I don’t have to talk it through as much. I can relax into the Presence.

I am learning to experience God as eternally present and conditioned on nothing but willingness.

The Presence – call it God, call it Source, call it what you like – is not contingent on external circumstances. It is as consistent and supportive and lovely in the forest as in traffic. It’s not out there. It’s inside. When you make contact with it, whatever appears to be outside is transformed. It has no power over you. It is beautiful and nurturing because that is how the Presence “sees.” You move through it – interact with it – but it’s all changed. It doesn’t seem as important or as real.

Navigating the internal landscape is not easy. In fact, it can be so terrifying and apparently challenging that returning to the external world can seem very reasonable! The interior is filled with fear and guilt. Images from the past haunt us – choices not made or made poorly, times we were victims and times we did the victimizing ourselves. Dread and gloom shade the future. Who needs it?

But that’s where the willingness comes in.

Can you let what you experience inside be? Can you look at the sludge and ugliness and just let it be? It’s not your job to fix it or heal it. The Holy Spirit will shine it away. All you need to do is come to that place where you allow that function to be fulfilled on your behalf.

Bringing illusion to truth, or the ego to God, is the Holy Spirit’s function. Keep not your making from your Father, for hiding it has cost you knowledge of Him and yourself. The knowledge is safe but where is your safety apart from it? (T-14.IX.1:4-6)

Spend a few minutes in meditation whenever possible. Don’t worry about getting it right. Right and wrong are not helpful ideas when it comes to God. Just be still – sitting, standing, walking, kneeling. Whatever. And let your mind do what it does: let it fill with the horror show. Let it be all judgmental and cruel. Let it be silly or boring.

And say: here you go, Jesus. Say: this one’s for you Holy Spirit.

Maybe not this hour and maybe not today even but soon you will discover that Jesus and the Holy Spirit are not simply metaphors. You will encounter an internal light – faint, flickering, tiny – and it will heal you. Slowly it will heal you. I feel completely comfortable promising you this is so!

Don’t run away from what scares you. Don’t hide from how horrible you think you are or how terrifying the world is or how rotten other people are. Give it over. In words, with images, in prayer. Sing it out loud if you have to! But find that willingness. A spark is all that is need to start the conflagration. Let go.

The Atonement does not make holy. You were created holy. It merely brings unholiness to holiness, or what you made to what you are (T-14.IX.1:1-3).

What you made to what you are . . . God created you perfect and you remain the perfect Creation of God. Find the truth of that! Everything else is of your own making. Let the many obstructions you made go. Undo the separation by accepting that it never happened. Let the One whose job it is to teach you that truth teach it to you.

And like that, you will be home.

Stillness in A Course in Miracles

Psalm 46 includes one of my favorite lines from the old testament: Be still, and know that I am God. Even as a child that appealed to me. It reminded me of forests and pastures. It reminded me that God seemed to go with me everywhere.

It begins with a heartfelt recognition that God is intimately connected to the ground of our being. When we are in contact with God, we cannot be shaken regardless of what tempests rage in the external world.

God is our refuge and strength,
an ever-present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way
and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam
and the mountains quake with their surging.

It is very much a song about the awesome extent of God’s power. On the one hand, he can bring desolation to the earth. On the other, he can end the wars which storm across it. And it offers one simple directive for knowing this all-powerful God: Be still. That’s all. In stillness, we know God.

A Course in Miracles echoes that theme.

Only be still and listen. You will hear the Word in which the Will of God the Son joins in his Father’s Will, at one with it, with no illusions interposed between the wholly indivisible and true (W-pI.125.9:3-4).

Stillness and quiet: these are the conditions in which and by which we know God. We don’t have to do anything else. No prayer, no ritual, no formal meditation positions. We merely enter that deep silence and listen in faith. We will know God there. Neither the psalmist nor the Author of the Course equivocate on this point.

Stillness and quiet, of course, are more than being sure that the television is off. They mean something different than just not moving. The truth is that we can come to sacred stillness on a busy city street – horns honking, engines blaring, sirens wailing. We can come to it while walking or dancing or kneading bread dough.

It is a quality of attention, a way of being present to what is. It is our ability to maintain a devoted concentration on our desire to know God. When knowledge of God is our sole objective, the externals – be they soup that’s a tad too cold, a breathtakingly beautiful sunset or a violent hurricane uprooting trees – become irrelevant. They cannot reach us. We are in the stillness that is God. We have become that stillness.

He speaks from nearer than your heart to you. His Voice is closer than your hand. His Love is everything you are and that He is; the same as you, and you the same as he (W-pI.125.7:2-4).

This is the secret that renders relationship with God practical and accessible. God is not a mystery to be unraveled by priests and scholars. God is not a gift given to few Holy saints secluded in convents and monasteries. You yourself are the peace for which you long. It is inside you as a condition of your being. You are not – you never were and you never can be – apart from God. In stillness, you remember this. In stillness, you accept it.

It is your voice to which you listen as He speaks to you (W-pI.125.8:1).

Sean isn’t God. The you you think that you are – this body, this personality, this history – isn’t God. Rather, the stillness inside us – the deep center from which all peace springs – is God. It is there waiting for us. It never changes. It saves us from the world and it saves us from the mortal self in which we have so long been deceived.

So practice that stillness. Make it your present reality. Every second in its presence is transformational. The separation ends. You know you are forever Home.

A Course in Miracles Lesson 151

All things are echoes of the Voice for God.

Be careful! The lesson doesn’t teach that things are echoes of God – it teaches that all things are echoes of the Voice for God, which is the Holy Spirit. The temptation is to try and bring God into the world – to see God as having agency and intelligence. But this world is a dream, already passing. God is beyond it. Here, in the dream, God’s Word is given through the Holy Spirit – the part of our mind that remembers what we are in truth, and accepts no substitute for what it knows.

Therefore, he Holy Spirit is our guide for understanding the world wrought by separation, and for knowing what to do within it, so long as we believe we are in it.

The world we perceive is based on our senses, which are themselves judgmental and partial. Even something as simple as a buttercup, which we take for granted, is something else to a cow, and something else yet again to a butterfly. Your perspective is always partial, and always slanted to your need to survive. This might temporarily serve the body’s interest in not dying, but you and I are not bodies.

You place pathetic faith in what your eyes and ears report. You think your fingers touch reality, and close upon the truth. This is awareness that you understand, and think more real than what is witnessed to by the eternal Voice for God Himself (W-pI.151.3:5-7).

We live in that world – we obey the laws of that world – and all of it merely reflects our belief in the judgments of ego, all of which are false (W-pI.151.4:4). Under ego’s interpretation, the world we perceive reinforces our vulnerability and sinfulness, and ultimately the inevitability of punishment for our guilt. It is a dark and hopeless construction.

There is – there is always – another way. Students of A Course in Miracles should have that tattooed someplace prominent. It really is the foundation of our practice and study.

. . . you must learn to doubt their (ego and body senses) evidence will clear the way to recognizing yourself, and let the Voice for God alone by Judge what is worthy of your own belief . . . He recognizes only what God loves, and in the holy light of what He sees do all the ego’s dreams of what you are vanish before the splendor He beholds (W-pI.151.7:1, 4).

It is helpful to remember that the above passage revolves not around how we see ourselves – or a buttercup, say – but rather how we see our brothers and sisters. It is our judgment of them which we need to release, in order to see in them only what God sees, and thus recognize our savior at last.

Heaven is the home of perfect purity, and God created it for you. Look on your holy brother, sinless as yourself, and let him lead you there (T-22.II.13:6-7).

Is it clear? We recognize our savior because we recognize ourself. Of our own, we can recognize this. We are too confused, too distracted, too vain, too scared. That is why A Course in Miracles teaches us how to hear only the Holy Spirit, who knows exactly how to make God’s perfect love clear to us in a loveless place.

He will remove all faith that you have placed in pain, disaster, suffering and loss. He gives you visions which can look beyond these grim apperances, and can behold the gentle face of Christ in all of them. You will no longer doubt that only good can come to you who are beloved of God, for He will judge all happenings, and teach the single lesson that they all contain (W-pI.151.10:1-3).

We experience this as an interpretation. As the ego told us what the world meant, now we listen to another Voice, and accept its meaning rather than our own. Ego speaks for survival, because fear is its reality. The Holy Spirit speaks for sharing and extension, because it knows that Love, not fear, is all the reality there is. Thus, we literally “see the love beyond the hate, the constancy in change, the pure in sin, and only Heaven’s blessing on the world” (W-pI.151.11:3). Can you imagine how this feels?

It feels like salvation. It feels like being born again.

That is why ACIM calls this “resurrection” – not the rising again of the body after death, but rather the realization that our life “stands beyond the body and the world” altogether (W-pI.151.12:2). This realization – this resurrection, which is internal, of the mind – reveals the face of Christ in all things, and removes all doubt in us about the sanctity and accessibility of God’s Will.

Today, we turn our minds over to our Creator, and ask that every thought be cleansed and purified of ego’s mistaken reading, so that the light of Love will be all that remains in each of them. Today we remember the peace of our creator, as a gift to us, which extends through us to all the world. In this way are all minds healed and unified “into a perfect Thought that offers its perfection everywhere” (W-pI.151.14:4).

This lesson reveals to us our ministry as students of A Course in Miracles. We are healed in order to bear witness to healing – to “carry round the world the joyous news that truth has no illusions, and the peace of God, through us, belongs to everyone” (W-pI.151.17:3).

This is our function now, not to be taken lightly. Let us learn how to gaze on our brothers and sisters as our saviors, and then accept the salvation they offer us, that we might extend it throughout the cosmos, a “gift of snow-white lilies” (W-pI.151.16:2) restoring to all minds their innocence and wholeness in Love.

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A Course in Miracles Lesson 150

My mind holds only what I think with God.

I will accept Atonement for myself (Lesson 139).
Only salvation can be said to cure (Lesson 140).

In a sense, we cannot accept Atonement for anyone but our own self. Yet in another sense, when we accept it for ourselves, we accept it for everyone. We are healed collectively, not individually. We “dwell in the Mind of God with our brother, for God Himself does not will to be alone” (T-11.I.1:6).

In truth, Lesson 139 is a gentle reminder of the need to be responsible for our own minds, and the effects of the thoughts we choose to think. To be responsible means to take others into consideration – to be aware of them, to hold them as equals, and to care about what happens to them. Mind is shared, not separate. Of course we ought to be responsible.

We are not saved alone, and yet the decision to be healed begins in our mind, with our unwillingness to continue suffering the ego’s self-perpetuating nightmare of separation. This is less about making a choice, then it is about accepting the simple truth of what we are. It is an acceptance of God’s Will rather than our own.

Only acceptance can be asked of you, for what you are is certain. It is set forever in the holy Mind of God, and in your own (W-pI.139.8:1-2).

When we remember who we are, we are blessed with happy dreams, which precede – which hasten and facilitate – our return to God.

The happy dreams the Holy Spirit brings are different from the dreaming of the world, where one can merely dream he is awake. The dreams forgiveness lets the mind perceive do not induce another form of sleep . . . (W-pI.140.3:1-2).

The emphasis here is on what our lives begin to look like as we accept the Holy Spirit’s guidance, and make our living more and more about our shared interest with our brothers and sisters. True joy arises in helping others, and in joining them in our journey away from fear and towards love. It becomes our journey, rather than my journey or your journey.

In a sense, healing is the happy dream that salvation is – a way of living out in the world the understanding that we are not bodies and there is no world. Salvation is the clear and quiet confidence that God’s Will is sufficient, and that our own will can be gently set aside.

Salvation heals the split mind that believes it is separate, and as its effects are undone, we wear the body and the world lighter and lighter. There is nothing to do, for it is all being done, perfectly. We accept this, and lean into the grace that acceptance establishes.

The only problem we have is the belief that we are separate from creation and from our creator. This is the root cause of all our seeming problems and all our apparent illnesses. Therefore, curing it is the solution to all problems and illnesses, ours and the world’s alike.

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