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Musings: A Little Willingness

September 17, 2013

lily pads

“Salvation is easy just because it asks nothing you cannot give right now.” – A Course in Miracles, Text, page 382

It is of enormous relief to know—finally, and with certainty—what our only function is. We should be looking one another in the eye and winking the “we’ve got a secret” look of lovers in love.

The secret is that we have the key to our happiness in our very hands. It is nowhere else.

The key to happiness is forgiveness. It is the simplest thing you will ever learn because it requires nothing of us that we cannot give right now. How do you like them apples? Do I have your attention, or did you turn away again? From the bottom of my heart I hope not, because this is the “pearl worth any price.”

The key is in your hand: guaranteed!!!! Think mind when you read hand. Hopefully you will learn here and now how to turn it: also in your mind. Learning requires that you be right-minded as opposed to wrong-minded.

Wrong-mindedness fears change. It fixates on what it thinks it knows. It thinks happiness is getting what we want. It thinks a whole lot of things are real, all of which turn out to be illusions.

Right-mindedness is willing to question what it thinks it knows, including where happiness comes from. It is willing to learn another way of seeing. It is willing to turn away from all assumptions of what reality is and walk the razor’s edge where our true education can begin.

The choice is yours. You have the willingness; it has already been given you. Don’t let fear hold you back. Give it to the One Who gave you willingness instead. Daily, a thousand times a day, you make this choice.

In order to learn from the teacher of forgiveness who knows the way to happiness,  you must resign as your own teacher. This is signified by the little willingness. This is the only way that you can ever be happy.

“If you listen to the wrong voice, you have lost sight of your soul.” – A Course in Miracles

There is a silent voice in you that will show you the way. Every second that you do not plan is an instant made available to the one who can give you your function. Your function is your happiness. To learn that your function and your happiness are the same is the simplest thing you will ever do. Any effort that you make will interfere. The following prayer from The Little Willingness, shows us how small our part is.

“I who am host to God am worthy of Him.

He Who established His dwelling place in me created it as

 He would have it be.

It is not needful that I make it ready for Him, but only

 that I do not interfere with His plan to restore to me

 my own awareness of my readiness, which is eternal.

I need add nothing to His plan.

But to receive it, I must be willing not to substitute my

Own in place of it.”

Filed Under: Lyn Corona, Musings Tagged With: A Course in Miracles, choice, happiness, Learner, The Teacher

Musings: Your Way Will Be Different… Out of the comfort zone. Help is available.

May 30, 2013

“If you want to be like me, I will help you, knowing we are alike. If you want to be different I will wait until you change your mind.” – Jesus, A Course in Miracles Text, page 145

You may not be willing yet to be shown another way because you are not so sure it offers more than what you’ve got. Rather than set sail into unknown territory, almost everyone agrees to the lie of separation and specialness. To walk out of the dream would be like turning your back on the tribe. You may be considered a traitor.

In this post I want to let you know that,  a. stepping out of your comfort zone is not easy, and b. help is available.

I have become convinced of a few things on this journey and from time to time I will pass these on to you in the hopes of saving you time and unnecessary suffering.  Here is the first time saver:

You need a teacher to help you navigate this transformation. This teacher will act as a guide and a comforter, showing you how to distinguish truth from illusion, pleasure from pain, and loving you more than you presently love yourself. Because you don’t love yourself you cannot help yourself.

You need a teacher to motivate you to wake up. Only one who knows what is on the other side of the dream could promise that waking offers you everything and mean it.

Without a teacher to show you how to train your mind you would stay on the battlefield, defend the little that you have, and die in the process. The teaching  of A Course in Miracles offers you resurrection, not death.

You need a teacher to show the cost to you of your choice to remain separate. You can’t see what you are doing because you believe it is reality.

You don’t know the way out of your self-inflicted suffering. But you can be shown by one who went beyond it and who offers to talk you through your own resurrection. In A Course in Miracles Jesus offers us his education and companionship in overcoming the world. Who better to teach us the resurrection of our mind than the one who accomplished it? By listening to what he has to say you can perhaps become a willing and coachable learner.

It is my pleasure to point you to the one who said, “If you want to be like me, I will help you, knowing we are alike. If you want to be different, I will wait until you change your mind.”

Now that statement is certainty, is it not?

That certainty is yours if you would learn how to join with the mind that could say such a thing. If you can, think of Jesus as a symbol of  love-without-opposite  in your right mind, and not what unhealed minds have made of him. That he died while suffering for our sins is a tragic misperception of a brother who only tried to teach us that we are loving and lovable by demonstrating it himself.

Filed Under: Lyn Corona, Musings Tagged With: A Course in Miracles, choice, death, resurrection, teacher

Musings: Making Our Weak Commitment Strong

April 14, 2012

water drip“AN UNTRAINED MIND CAN ACCOMPLISH NOTHING.”

The ideas shared in lessons 181 to 200 of A Course in Miracles are designed to help us in “firming up our willingness to make our weak commitment strong.” In other words, we know we want to change our minds, but we are dealing with the entrenched thought system of the ego which is set as the default mechanism for our thinking and decision making.The ego rules when we are not certain of our goal and the means to accomplish it.

Each of these lessons will lead us home, but first they will expose our mistaken choice for the ego so it can be seen and gone beyond. What remains unseen is still there, functioning beneath the surface of our awareness, where it remains only to be projected outside the mind.

Lesson 181- I trust my brothers who are one with me.

This lesson is not about trusting other bodies to do what is honorable, fair and good. Your brother is not his body or its behavior, although the ego, whose triumph over God is the body, would love you to think so. This lesson is referring to the sinlessness of the Christ mind which we all are and which is always worthy of trust. The ego, whose mantra is “one or the other”/”kill or be killed”, can never be trusted.

Students of A Course in Miracles, trying to do the spiritual thing, will often take a lesson like this—I trust my brothers who are one with me—and try to trust the body and its behavior even though it is ruled by the tyranny of the ego.

It is entirely possible, in fact it must be practiced vigilantly, to trust the One Self that we are while not denying the harmfulness of the ego’s decisions which are always based upon self interest. The distinction lies in understanding that the lessons in the Course, are about the content of your mind, and the content you believe to be in your brother’s mind, and not the forms that we seem to take, along with the form’s behavior. The basis for practicing forgiveness is  understanding the difference.

A Course in Miracles is written to the mind that has the power to choose. There is a choice to be made and only you can make it. Only the time you choose to make it is up to you. Eventually everyone will make it because it is the only real choice. The alternatives are not up to you either. (See the Introduction to A Course in Miracles below).

The power to choose is meaningless unless you know what you are choosing between. The alternatives can be expressed in different ways: dreaming or waking; fear or love; illusion or truth; death or life. The choice is always the same: to place your mind under the true Authority or the tyranny of the ego.

The purpose of every lesson is to make the alternatives clear to you so you can make the better choice.

Introduction to A Course in Miracles

“This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean that you can establish the curriculum. It means only that you can elect what you want to take at a given time. The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.

This course can therefore be summed up very simply in this way:

“Nothing real can be threatened.

Nothing unreal exists.

Herein lies the peace of God.”

Filed Under: Lyn Corona, Musings, Site Map Tagged With: A Course in Miracles, authority, body, choice, Ego, forgiveness, trust

Musings: Self Sabotaging Behavior

October 4, 2011

Once we heed the call to wake up from the ego thought system we begin to see the world differently.

It becomes a classroom in which everything can be used to learn to make a different choice that will lead us out of the dream of separation instead of deeper into it.

Until we understand what we are choosing between, choice is meaningless. We but choose among illusions, which can hardly be called a choice.

“There is a choice that you have the power to make when you have seen the real alternative. Until that point is reached you have no choice, and you can but decide the better to deceive yourself again.”

Self sabotaging behavior is behavior that we know is not in our best interest, yet we do it anyway.

We eat foods that hurt us. We drive people away with behaviors that cause them difficulty. We spend our time doing things that we don’t even respect. We don’t exercise when we know that we should. We drink too much, spend more than we have, smoke, gamble, and generally overindulge.

Self sabotage is a classroom that most of us share. Fortunately, it provides an excellent opportunity for changing our minds because we are aware of our need for change every time we indulge. And we are convinced it is the behavior that needs to change.

The School for A Course in Miracles offers another alternative to trying to change behavior. All our do’s and dont’s can be see as a reflection of a choice in our minds. Which teacher are we running with, the ego or the Holy Spirit?

 Self sabotaging behavior is always one of the SFACIM subjects, viewed from the perspective of A Course in Miracles.

Filed Under: Lyn Corona, Musings, Site Map Tagged With: A Course in Miracles, choice, Ego, School of Reason

There Is No Peace Except the Peace of God

October 22, 2010

Inviting path“There is no peace except the peace of God, unless you seek for misery and pain.”

 Lesson 200

The lessons of A Course in Miracles are a song that comes from the heart of Love to the heart of one that sleeps.

They are meant just for you its reader and no one else, as intimate as you will allow them to be. They undo suffering at its cause: your mistake-in-identity.

You are a dreamer and this is your dream of separation. You have dreamed everything in your dream and you can continue to dream and stay asleep. Or you can choose to wake up by inviting the lessons of the Course into your dream to help you look at it and learn to see it from the perspective of wholeness.

Undoing the belief in a separate self with a private will is the inevitable outcome of setting foot on this path of liberation. Along the way false beliefs will be undone, trials and tribulations gone beyond, and glorious things learned as we pass from conflict, through peace to oneness.

Oneness is love.

I love what the Course has taught me and I think I can help others learn from it as well. This is a passage that we make together by sharing what we are learning so that conviction will be strengthened in everyone. It is a way of opening our eyes, ears, and mind to the possibility of living without fear.

Waking is not religious or even spiritual.

Waking to Oneness is truth.

It’s simply what is.

There are many lessons in A Course in Miracles that have altered my point of view so radically that the world never appeared the same after that. It was if something left me that was never there in the first place. I couldn’t tell you what it was because it is gone. Call it illusion, falsity, pretense, effort: whatever it was, its going left space in which something new and surprising could occur, not as a one-time event but as an on-going mystery unfolding.

I thought it might be helpful to others to share parts of those lessons and my perspective on them. This is one of those lessons.

Lesson 200—There is no peace accept the peace of God.

“There is nothing else for you to find except the peace of God, unless you seek for misery and pain.”

That is a pretty unequivocal statement. There is nothing else for you to find except the peace of God. That is, unless you seek for misery and pain. The peace of God or misery and pain, take your pick. Those are the only options.

 It is understandable if you want to argue with that statement given the investment you might have in your dream.  Arrogance is the first and perhaps only real obstacle to becoming a learner of another way, entirely unknown to you. We want to be right about what we think reality is in spite of the fact that it is causing us misery and pain and always ends in death. Wouldn’t you be better off if you were wrong, aside from the fact that you are wrong? (I didn’t say those famous last words. Jesus did.)

Lesson 200 makes perfectly clear what the choice is. A real choice doesn’t have an alternative. It ends choosing altogether, returning the mind to what you really want: peace.

Here is where the ego, that false sense of personal identity, loudly begins to resist. You know its sound and the feelings that arise when defense feels necessary to protect the little that you have and think you know. It says things like,”Peace sounds boring, don’t you think?” “I want a lot of other things AND peace. Let’s make a deal.”

The personal point of view tells us that it would be a sacrifice to let go of “conflicting goals, senseless journeys, frantic vain pursuits, and meaningless endeavors” and to want the only thing that can be found.

There is another voice. It is silent and yet it knows the way back to peace with perfect certainty. The truth is already within us but we are in perpetual conflict because we hear two opposing voices and we have to choose only one.

You are the chooser of which voice to listen to, which calling to obey. You are the one who is humble and willing to trust in a better way than the direction you are currently going. Lesson 200 is written to you. In fact, all the lessons are.

No ego would ever choose the peace of God because it does not contain the “gift” of specialness that the ego seeks. Peace cannot be possessed by anyone so it has little appeal to the individual. No one else will even know if your mind is changed and you have found the peace of God.

(Note: One of the things that most students of the Course overlook is that the lessons do not give the personal “you” anything. To the ego the lessons are either a waste of time or they require  romanticizing so that the ego can delude itself in thinking it is getting somewhere or something with the lessons.

It is actually the seeker (ego) itself that gets undone in the lessons of the Course. The seeker wants  peace as a possession for itself so it approaches the lessons as a way to acquire what it thinks it is missing. Undoing the seeker reveals the peace that has always been.

So let’s be clear that the lessons undo. They may sound poetic to a personal self that can turn anything into a tune to its glory but if you actually open to the lesson you will see it is presenting you with the opportunity to look at the arrogance of the ego so that it can be seen for what it is and forgiven.)

“Forgive yourself for vain imaginings, and seek no longer what you cannot find. For what could be more foolish than to seek, and seek and seek again for hell, when you have but to look with open eyes (not from the self centered point of view*) to find that Heaven lies before you, through a door that opens easily to welcome you?”

All you need do is look upon the you that seeks in all the wrong places and for all the wrong things and see that it has never brought you peace. These are all vain imaginings of a separate self, arrogant in its attempts to make itself better than other men and always failing in the end because no matter how good the dream,  it always ends in death.

Peace belongs to you, the chooser of peace, the non-locatable presence that has been released from misidentification with a body. What chooses the peace of God already has and is the peace of God. (This is so simple and yet it is so difficult to speak about because the words aren’t it. They point; that’s all).

Now here comes the practical application of learning that there is nothing to find here except peace. Give it! Since you can’t get anything, because there is no seeker who lacks anything, you can only give. In giving without exception you teach yourself what you truly are.

 “It is given you to find the means whereby the world no longer seems to be a prison house for anyone.”

“Freedom is given you where you beheld but chains and iron doors. But you must change your mind about the purpose of the world, if you would find escape.”

Here it is: plain and simple. (Nobody wants to hear this).

“You must change your mind about the purpose of the world.”

For most, the world is a prison house and we are its victim. It gives to take away. We lose the things we love. We are born, struggle a while, get old and sick and die.

For others, the world is their playground, filled with the idols to their specialness. Their hope is that these “special deities” will give them more than others so they feel successful.

Neither purpose, prison house or playground, will show you that you are free.

Here’s what will.

“You will be bound till all the world is seen by you as blessed, and everyone made 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.”

Here is the way to peace, the bridge to eternity. This is your purpose and your function while you abide where you are not at home. The key here is “all” and “everyone”. Make no exceptions. It is not the people we love that are the problem. It is the ones we don’t love, the ones we blame for our unhappiness, that hold the key to our freedom. They are innocent in eternity as are you, outside of which we are nowhere.

 “Who could hope for more, while there still appears to be a choice to make between success and failure; love and fear?”

Filed Under: Lyn Corona, Musings, Site Map Tagged With: A Course in Miracles, choice, Ego, Peace

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