Personal Investment

"No one with a personal investment is a reliable witness, for truth to him has become what he wants it to be." -- A Course in Miracles; Chapter 12, Section I, 5:2

"One thought, completely unified, will serve to unify all thought. This is the same as saying one correction will suffice for all correction, or that to forgive one brother wholly is enough to bring salvation to all minds." -- A Course in Miracles; Workbook Lesson 108, 5:1-2

I've been an impatient person much of my life, with a personal investment in hurrying conversations along. On top of that, I like to be right. So I've learned that I'm not a reliable witness to anything at all. Trusting my personal self to judge a person or a situation is totally ridiculous. Thank God there is One in me who has no personal investment. There is One Self in us all that will judge truly and inclusively, with love and forgiveness of every error, if we only release our personal investment and ask. That is how salvation works. That is how our thought becomes impersonal and unified.

The impersonal, inclusive, all-encompassing perspective of Our True Self doesn't require us to become zombies or robots. We still have an apparent life-stream, an apparent persona, who will continue to make apparent mistakes. But since none of this is ever true, nor has ever been true, forgiveness becomes the way we walk in the world. Forgiveness becomes what everything is for. This makes our personal experiences a heck of a lot more enjoyable, and releases us from the narcissistic tendencies that plague us all... to tell our own stories our way, to judge others as the enemy, to always be right, to be on top, to be seen by others the way we want to be seen... the list of narcissistic tendencies is quite long. Ask any mental health professional. What most of us don't realize is that all of us have a personal investment in how we see things. And so all of us are caught in a narcissistic dream. We see ourselves as separate from others and from God. We are lost in dreaming.

Forgiveness is all about realizing that our perceptions are simply false. Period. And as we ask the Holy Spirit, the Voice of Our True Self within each of our minds, to help us awaken by releasing our personal investments, we find a new world rising before us. In this world there are no separate interests. There are no competitions. There is only Love, and sometimes a cry for Love. And nothing else.

"Heaven is not a place nor a condition. It is merely an awareness of perfect Oneness, and the knowledge that there is nothing else; nothing outside this Oneness, and nothing else within." -- A Course in Miracles; Chapter 18, Section VI, 1:5-6

"Let us learn of the real and eternal, and prepare for the reign of Spirit, the Kingdom of Heaven; the reign and rule of universal harmony, which cannot be lost nor remain forever unseen." -- Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy; Page 208, Line 19