Musings: Gratitude… Part two

March 20, 2015

We are thankful for one thing alone:

God has given the gift of love to each of us.

The ego is grateful because He has favored us in some special way while others suffer.

Salvation is an equal playing field on which everyone has been given everything. (There is nothing the ego scorns more than indiscriminate love.)

It is our responsibility to see it that way because that is the way it is. The way out of hell is the same for everyone. We must learn to see the world forgiveness sees.

Let forgiveness extend to everyone without exception. Do not exclude anyone. There is only One Son of God: Christ.

(The words God, Christ and Son of God are symbols of symbols. They stand for Love. Love is Oneness.)

Saying “we are one” is not the same as Oneness. While we identify ourselves as separated selves– separate from our Creator and separate from others– our profession (according to the Course) is to exclude no one from love. This is the means given us to reach the gates of Oneness: accept God’s Love by being loving.

As the lesson points out, we “earn” (symbolically) the right to love by being loving. God isn’t withholding love from us. We are keeping it from ourselves. Earning the right is a way of saying we can give love until we accept that we are love. It’s a wonderful plan.

We have been given everything.

First of all, we never changed reality so it remains Love and we are still loveable. Secondly, our first loving action is to bless the world with forgiveness. FOR THIS we should be grateful. How beautiful. How clean and simple and perfect is that? Who is unwilling to take part?

“You will be bound till all the world is seen by you as blessed, and everyone set free of your mistakes and honored as he is. You made him not; no more yourself. And as you free the one the other is accepted as he is.” Lesson 200

We can offer our friends, family, colleagues, partners, friends and enemies alike, their freedom by looking at the thoughts we hold against them and deciding we prefer not to keep that point of view. In wanting to see differently we will.

When our forgiveness is complete we will have total gratitude.

Musings: A Christmas Conversation

January 6, 2015

A Christmas Conversation

Daily, let me remember this: I have but one brother,

and that is always the one who is before me.

I can see Ken smile and hear him say “….and make no exceptions. This is the way home.”

I hear Jesus, too: “I assure you this is the easiest way home once fully understood.”

My part is to understand and practice the means: forgiveness.

He continues, “Your way will be different, not in purpose but in means. A holy relationship is a means of saving time. One instant together with your brother restores the universe to both of you.”

“The universe is one. I am showing you the way to union. The gift of union is the only gift that I was born to give. That is my Christmas gift to you.”

“Bring your fears to me; this is all I ask you to do. Give me your fear and I will lay before your feet the peace of God. You will not be asked to give away anything you think is real. It is the Holy Spirit’s teaching that will show you what is real and what is not.”

” Accept the Holy Spirit as your teacher, the one you turn to with your fears. They are the only gifts that you can give that will bring your teacher to you. Anything you learn from Him is given to all. The more you give to all, the more you experience having and being the universe “.

Musings: Is It Healing or Fixing?

October 15, 2014

“You can’t fix what isn’t real. What’s real doesn’t need fixing.”

When you see a problem in someone else—sickness, mood, disposition—it is your mind that is in need of healing, not the one in whom the problem appears to reside.

There is only one problem…..ever. It is the idea of separation in the mind. If the indivisibility of a single whole mind is to be recognized, healing of the mind must occur.

A Course in Miracles is maddeningly relentless and impeccable in its teaching of non-duality. It leaves no un-swept corners in the mind where the ego’s belief in separation can remain hidden. One of those corners is our own good intentions to help others with their problems without first healing ourselves.

When we attempt to fix problems in someone else we are missing the point. It is an opportunity for our own healing, not someone else’s. Only a healed healer can heal. He heals by knowing we are all already healed. The certainty in his mind extends through his mind to other minds without him doing anything for which he could take either credit or blame.

This is not to say that one could not also do something in whatever form might be most helpful. However his certainty is that regardless of what he does in form, healing is already accomplished.

How different this is from fixing which can only occur where there is an idea of inequality and of “other”.

Yesterday someone tried to fix a problem that I thought I had. He first had to make the problem real by agreeing with it. He then took out his tools that he had learned in a training and began to try to fix my problem. The feeling that arose within me as this was going on was one of inequality. He, with his solution, was superior to me with my problem. Now we both had the same sickness, separation. There was no way out.

When we try to heal at the level of form we are attempting to keep the real problem which is in the mind. That way the ego, our false sense of self, is preserved.

This whole situation illustrated the important distinction between healing and fixing. If there is anything but perfect equality in any relationship the idea of competition has entered the mind. How can there be healing where there is one who is superior? Separation is reinforced rather than healed.

Unhealed healers believe the problem is where it is not, in the body and not the mind. The fact is that we are all already healed…..no exception. Minds are already joined and there is only one.

Nothing that is real that could possibly need fixing. Nothing unreal exists. We do not believe that however, or we wouldn’t be seeing the world of suffering that we see. It is the seer that needs to change the way in which he sees. He needs to learn to see with different eyes and hear with different ears. For that shift he needs a Teacher from beyond the world of form, one that doesn’t believe in differences of any kind.

A Course in Miracles teaches us how to make ourselves accessible to a Teacher who can show us how to look with a single eye from beyond the body and see a different world. This translocation of self from identification with the body to a singular consciousness is the awakened state we all pretend to seek and at the same time fear. It is the shift from the personal and the private, to the oneness of heaven and non-specificity. This is the land of “no-thing” and it is this that you and I fear. That’s what God is. And that’s what Love is. And thats what the Peace of God is. And that’s Heaven. And that’s what you are afraid of.

Would you like to live without fear? Would you like to experience Love? Would you like to be free of torment?

Musings: “Where are dreams but in a mind asleep?”

September 7, 2014

A course to end all dreaming- that’s what A Course in Miracles is. All ego dreams, sleeping or waking, are based in fear. Whether the plot be pleasurable or painful, triumphant or ends in loss, ego dreams are spawned in mind asleep and dreaming of separation. In those dreams we are separated from God and our brothers, and feel split within our own mind. What good can possibly come from dreams that seek to prove that separation is reality?

A world in which we are born into a body that lives a little while and then grows old and dies is the dream that Jesus, teacher of resurrection, will awaken us from if only we will listen to him and do as he says. Resistance is strong because we believe our little lives, pitiful as they may be, are what we are. It is a mistake to be corrected, not a sin to be punished.

Jesus makes a distinction in his course that is still unknown to most of the world. The distinction is fundamental to learning and applying the Course’s lessons so that they change the way we see the world. To the individual it is a prison or a playground, determined by whether our specialness gets what it wants or not. When we get our way it is a playground. When we don’t, it is a prison. Our response when we don’t like the way things go is to change behavior or circumstances. To Jesus the world is a classroom for changing our minds. The problem is we don’t know we have a mind.

In the Course Jesus teaches us that the brain is not the mind. It is part of the body, the manifestation of the thought of separation. Its function is given it by the ego that treasures specialness and individuality and seeks only to prove our personhood is true. The effect is to keep us mindless and asleep. Unaware that we have a mind we can never change it. This is significant because it is the mind not the body that awakens or resurrects. Resurrection is the lesson Jesus learned that “most of all he would have us learn.” C5. 6:8 How can we learn it if we choose to remain asleep and dreaming, believing what our brains and bodies tell us? This is the ego’s fool proof defense of its false identity. But it is not “God proof”.

The world misunderstood Jesus’ earlier teaching of the resurrection over 2000 years ago because it did not have the education that Jesus is now giving us in A Course in Miracles. It could only assume that the body resurrected because it did not know about a mind, let alone how to change it. In learning that our home is in the mind and that minds are joined we can become happy learners of another way that ends dreaming through the gentle path of forgiveness. Forgiveness is something anyone can do simply because it requires nothing of us but a little willingness to learn from a teacher other than our ego. It is a level playing field on which everyone is equally qualified to join Jesus in what he calls “a game that happy children play.” W-p1.153.12:1

Forgiveness, the miracle, the holy instant, and the holy relationship are all terms used in the Course for the return to the mind. They signify stepping above the world’s battleground and joining Jesus in true humility and willingness to be taught. We cannot teach ourselves because we are the problem– the dreamer of fearful dreams in which everything dies. Who would doubt Jesus advice: “Resign now as your own teacher, for you have been badly taught.” T-12…V.8:3

If we knew for certain that the world is a dream we would not hesitate to leave it. It is forgiveness that shows us its unreality. Jesus overcame the world by not believing in it and we must do the same. It is not by struggling against it, but through the process of forgiveness that we learn the world cannot affect us, and ultimately that it does not exist at all. “There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach.” W-p1…132.6:2,3

Jesus is waiting for our resignation as our own teacher to give him the chance to show us that we can never be harmed, or hurt, or suffer, or die. Pain of any kind is a dream of punishment for a crime that never happened in the Mind of God where we reside. God does not sleep, nor dream, and we are like Him and not as we have made ourselves. Nor can we leave His Mind except in sleep.

“From the heart, may it go to the heart.”

Musings: Invitation to Love’s Presence

June 24, 2014

“Undoing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence” is the curriculum of A Course in Miracles. It is a required course….undoing the blocks, that is. Only the time we take it is voluntary.

Everyone, without exception, wants to feel love’s presence informing their thoughts and actions while moving through this world of time and space. As our natural inheritance, it goes with us wherever we go.

Love is singular so there are no separate wills. The One Will for us is perfect happiness. It’s our will as well. Why should we choose to go against That Will? That’s a good question.

Perhaps we think we have a private will and would like The One Will to deliver on our terms. Bob Dylan once sang in the song, When Ya Gonna Wake Up, “Do you think that God is just an errand boy to satisfy your wandering desires?”

God gives us more than we know how to desire.

Those things we think we want are childish and self-centered. They are part of dreaming but they will not give us what we really want. God’s Will is beyond anything we can imagine.

When we begin the journey home we don’t believe that there is something more fulfilling than having our personal needs and wants met. We are familiar with the dreams and even though their pleasure is fleeting we prefer them to an unknown surprise that might awaken us from dreaming entirely.

Sharing the journey with others encourages us to give up the belief in sacrifice. Love does not demand sacrifice of any kind. Our own plans for happiness fade as we begin to feel love’s presence. I hope we can learn this together.

Musings: Save Yourself, Bless the World

May 30, 2014

“Let Him teach you what you need to learn to lay all fear aside, and know your Self as love, which has no opposite in you.”

Please consider this today. There is a Presence that surrounds you, which is your Self. It is constantly informing you of your True Nature which is love without opposite. The environment in which it resides is a state of grace.

When you are absorbed in your body self, consumed with fear, conflict and self interest you cut off the possibility of harmonizing with this Loving Presence which would make your day purposeful and effortless.

Private (what about me?) thoughts of worry, anxiety, lack, inadequacy, and so on, must be brought to the light of this Presence so they can be shined away and you can return to alignment with the Self that you are. This is your responsibility now. This is your salvation and the salvation of the world.

Forgive your personal insanity and the insanity of the world so that this Presence can transform your thoughts and actions in this moment bringing peace to you and to the tired and aching world. This is your part in The Great Awakening that is occurring in all humanity now.

This strength is yours to feel and to give. It is your joy. Your part is essential now.

Musings: Only the Mind is Real

May 4, 2014

means meadow in the fall — **Means Meadow**

“Only the mind is real because only the mind can be shared.” (T-6. V.A. 3:2-3).

The body is neutral. Think of it as a mindless puppet and you are the one who pulls the strings. The puppet only responds to the decisions of the mind. The body has no thoughts, feelings or experiences of its own. It does what its master tells it to do. It is a symbol of what the mind dreams we are—a separated individual with a will of our own.

“The body is the symbol of what you think you are. It is clearly a separation device, and therefore does not exist.” (T-6.V.A.2:2-3).

If you want to try to prove that you are a body—that you are right and God is wrong, that separation is reality and perfect oneness is a lie—then you (the one pulling the strings) will want to make it seem that the body has power of its own and it can tell you who you are and how you feel. What better way to do that than for the mind to direct the body to feel pleasure and pain? This is all part of the ego’s plan to keep you mindless. Now it seems like life is in the body and not in the mind of the one pulling the strings.

“The body neither lives nor dies, because it cannot contain you who are life.” (T.6.V.A.1:4).

The real question you should ask yourself is what rules the mind? Who is it that is pulling the strings of the puppet? Is it the ego that wants separation, individuality, and specialness to be reality? If it is then the body/puppet must be made to appear to be alive because it seems to prove that separation is real. Under the ego’s direction the puppet will attack (judge) other puppets, and feel pleasure and pain. It will be different from others of its kind. This is the ego’s world, based in the tiny mad idea of separation, ruled by separate interests, all coming from the mind.

There is another way but you first must get back to the mind and recover your power as a decision making mind. You are the chooser of what rules your mind and therefore what directs the body. If you like being a person in a dream in a world of separate interests then you are probably not going to want to do this.

The shift from the body to the mind is what transformation is all about. It requires willingness to abandon the ego as your teacher in order to learn from a teacher who is outside the dream. In A Course in Miracles that teacher is Jesus, because he is a symbol of perfect, ego-less, love. You could use any other symbol that works for you.

It is impossible for you to make this transformation from fear to love, body to mind without help. All the talents, skills, abilities that you have developed over the years have been useful only for navigating the ego’s dream of separation. These same skills cannot be used to shift your identity from the body back to the mind. Again, the ego’s purpose is to keep you from ever knowing you are a decision making mind. After all, if you knew you would choose against it.

Be forewarned. When the ego gets wind of this it will become one of its two predominant moods: suspicious or vicious. It will threaten you with sacrifice and loss as it sees its days of specialness are numbered. Awakened mind, Suzanne Segal, author of Collision with the Infinite, A Life Beyond the Personal Self, expressed the fear this way:

Life in a state of freedom from the ego “bears no resemblance to the stark emptiness that fear might paint it to be. People who tell me they don’t want to give up the personal because they believe they would be giving up love or joy or deep feeling don’t understand that the personal never existed. Nothing is given up. Love that appears to be personal is based on an ego-constructed sense of being separate.”

At no one instant does the body exist at all. It is always past or future. In this very instant it can’t be found. Life is now and is in the mind. Hurry home.

A question to ponder: Why would it matter how long the body lives?

Musings: “Your way will be different!”

April 17, 2014

“Your way will be different. … A holy relationship is a means of saving time. One instant spent together with your brother restores the universe to both of you.”

A holy relationship! This is the means A Course in Miracles has given us for returning to the home we never really left, that quiet center of rest where we need do nothing.

Have you paid close attention to Jesus’ instructions for saving time and saving the world while saving ourselves by waking up together? Here is the pearl worth any price, the keys to the kingdom, the goose that lays golden eggs, and the fountain of youth, and more.

If you have overlooked the possibilities I feel compelled to present them in a way that I hope will gain your interest, open your mind, and have you come away with a whole new appreciation for your brother and the opportunity he is giving you and you him, to awaken together. There is no sacrifice in this, although you may be thinking it.

I want to help you to understand, feel and appreciate what a relationship is honestly for so that you can recognize the holiness of all relationships, without exception. I guarantee you it has nothing to do with what the ego plans for your relationships.

Some of this may be very difficult to hear because the sense of being a separate individual is threatened. When you truly join with your brother there will be no awareness of the body. It is left behind. That is called a holy instant and that is where a holy relationship resides. It is not here, in a body, in a world, although you will still appear to be here.

The ego cannot imagine you without a body. It is specialness that has you hold on to the body as if it is you. Wanting to remain separate is what the ego wants. It is terrified of Oneness, which is of the mind, because it is the ego’s demise.

The ego, individuality, and specialness are limits that you have placed on love. You chose to do that and you will eventually choose to turn away from those limitations when you understand the cost.

Those costs will be pointed out to you here. What you don’t like or don’t want to hear will tell you who is reading, listening, and perceiving these words. The ego wants and promotes separate interests. It wants everything on its terms. It doesn’t want change. Notice when it arises. It is very useful information.

I am hopeful that I can illuminate the holy relationship so that you will find it desirable rather than something to run from. Perhaps it will be helpful to think whole when you read holy instead of conjuring up images of halos and doe-eyed faces.

Holiness (wholeness) is not something that can be possessed so the ego has a problem with it. The ego exists by possession of others to fulfill its needs and wants. Without others it can not exist. The ego is not going to like this.

You on the other hand will love it! Now I am talking to your right mind that wants something different than what the ego wants. You may not know what it is, but you know what it is not. It is not possession, bargaining, manipulation, control. It is not doubt, fear, and guilt.

You want another way and you are willing to become a learner of that way. You are the chooser, not a body with a brain. The chooser resides between the right mind and the wrong mind; the part of the mind that chooses holiness and the part of the mind that chooses the body. It’s up to you.

The Lie

We are all living a lie here. Our very existence as separate bodies with a life and will of our own is a lie, and we re-enact this lie with “others” on a daily basis. It is here in our special relationships that we will heal the cosmic lie of being separate from our Creator, Oneness, Love and Eternal Life.

Why do we stay with the lie of our separateness and the few special relationships that seem to give us some comfort? It is to protect the ego’s thought system of separation. The ego asserts separation is real, I am real, and don’t you forget it!

The purpose of our special (and not holy) relationships is to keep us mindless, fixated in the lie. There is a “me” and there is a “you” and let us take our comfort here in separation and never look for another way. It’s a strange sort of comfort, but it keeps our belief in individuality safe.

For more on what is the holy relationship: click here

Musings: What’s Valuable?

April 15, 2014

“Nothing is so easy to recognize as truth.”

Regardless of what state I am in right now there is a river of peace underneath all of it.

It goes with me wherever I go, in spite of everything going on in my ordinary life. It is not subject to any of it. It cannot be harmed or hurt. It cannot die; it was never born. It is eternal. It is what is looking through these eyes right now. It is what hears the sound of the night and it is the sounds themselves. It is what writes these words.

It is so very close to me that I am not apart from it. It is what I am.

It is arrogance, not humility, that won’t accept what I am. It is arrogance that asserts I am something else—worried, anxious, fearful—when it has tasted what can only be recognized as real. It is arrogance that thinks it can make itself some way other than the way it is.

It is what I am apart from anything I might call myself: sick, a failure, powerless. It is not affected by any of the disappointments I have endured or any of the awful things I have ever done.

It is what (not who) I am prior to any role that I have played: mother, teacher, wife, lover, liberal, woman, artist, friend, writer.

Why haven’t I noticed it as more than just a passing state before? Why haven’t I noticed that it is always there? Why haven’t we all?

Might it be that I have not paid it the slightest bit of attention and so it went unnoticed. Yet this alone is worthy of my full attention.

“Nothing is so easy to recognize as truth.” T. 137

This that I am goes on while shopping, doing the dishes, writing, sleeping, going for walks, being with friends. Sometimes I get caught up in a dream and I lose contact for a while. I start to feel out of sorts before long as a reminder that my attention has wandered from what is truly valuable because it brings me peace.

I can’t outrun it, hide from it, overcome it, rise above it, get around it, or go below it. It is with me wherever I go, whatever I do. Even when I forget it is there waiting for me to return.

This that I am has no weight and no dimension. It has no past and no future. It doesn’t have problems and it isn’t afraid. It doesn’t have moods. It doesn’t suffer. It has no need to plan. It does what needs to be done when the time comes to do it. It thinks when necessary and then it is still. It enjoys everything and resists nothing.

When A Course in Miracles came into my life many years ago it made some things very clear to me: that I was miserable; why I was miserable; and how I could leave misery behind.

The change didn’t happen overnight (in fact it continues to deepen). My misery had become very familiar. Who or what would I be without it? The emptiness was frightening each time I saw through some painful story I was telling myself and let it go. Would something come to fill the space that opened up when fear didn’t occupy every corner of my mind?

I waited impatiently, and then one day I waited patiently, with the certainty that something–I knew not what– would come to me. I didn’t care any longer how long I needed to wait. It was certain. And it did. It is never ending.

We suffer. But it doesn’t need to be that way. It is a choice. We can learn to make a different one that points us straight to what we are. It is there waiting for us to recognize, to bow down to in ourselves; in everyone.

It is possible that the only real desire I have left is help others come home to the Self they never left but only forgot for a while. It is the only thing that interests me when I meet someone or am with my family or friends and they have not yet turned to the constant source of joy within. I find myself silently saying turn, turn. It is so easy once you see it.

There is a point where you know “a happy outcome to all things is sure.”

Do you know it? Would you like to?

Musings: It Never Happened

October 28, 2013

“As long as there is a ‘you’ doing or not doing, thinking or not-thinking, meditating or not meditating, you are no closer to home than the day you were born.”

There is whole-hearted joy without an opposite and peace that is completely still. There is no other explanation other than something was removed because what is recognized is already here; it could not have been something added. It’s closer than the body. Palpable.

Feel oneness everywhere… here, now. There is no one left to worry.

I realize that this sounds like the ravings on a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s. That’s why folks don’t talk about this much. We sound like blithering idiots.

Time has stopped……….

There is only what’s happenin’ now. And what’s happenin’ now is perfect. My point of view has shifted. It is above the battleground that we call life.

From here nothing needs to be fixed or changed. The battleground is a dream. Seen from above it is clear that we can neither hurt or be hurt. That’s forgiveness. Hurt only happens in dreams of madness.

We don’t forgive. That’s not how it works. We drop our self concept of victim and victimizer and there we are above the battleground. The world is forgiven. It is so simple it is hard to believe. The whole thing is healed in an instant. Gone.

What we thought occurred has not. There is no world to be in. No one did anything to anyone. It was guilt, projected from the mind that thought it could get rid of a bad thought in the mind by projecting it.

What happened in the mind? A tiny mad idea of separation that was corrected the instant it occurred.Nothing happened. It had no effect except in the mind that thought it and then believed it. We are innocent of making a world of suffering.