Merry Christmas!

"You Who remember what I really am, remember what I really want.  And all I want is what You offer me, in just the form You choose that it be mine.  Let me not forget, my self is nothing, but my Self is all." -- A Course in Miracles; Workbook 358, 1:1, 4, 7

As I sit waiting for the dawn on Christmas morning, I'm filled with gratitude for the Self we share, the Christ-Self that is born again and again as each holy mind awakens it ItSelf.  And I know that no story of Santa Clause, however sweet and wonderful, can compare to the miracles we experience through remembering our Christ-Self.

Our way is lit by miracles... the healed perceptions that lift us to remembrance.  And each holy instant becomes sacred, regardless of form or appearance.  "All I want is what You offer me, in just the form You choose that it be mine."  Yes!  Such freedom and grace in this effortless and radical reliance on what is True.  "Let me not forget, my self is nothing, but my Self is all."

May the merriest of joy-filled moments be yours on this Christmas morning, as we remember Who We really Are.

"The sign of Christmas is a star, a light in darkness.  See it not outside yourself, but shining in the the Heaven within, and accept it as the sign the time of Christ has come." -- A Course in Miracles; Chapter 15, Section XI, 2:1-2

All in All

"Remember always that you cannot be anywhere except in the Mind of God." -- A Course in Miracles; Chapter 9, Section VIII, 5:3

Last night I was lifting my thought to God before sleep.  As I remembered that God is All, thought followed thought.  If God is All, then there is no such thing as someone in need of healing or supply... God IS the need and the healing and supply.  If God is All, then there is no such thing as me and God... God IS the life and being that I think of as me.  If God is All, then there is no such thing as other people, no such thing as strangers... God IS the life and being of all that is.  God is All in All.

My daily fragmented thinking can barely conceive of such Wholeness.  I think in separate terms, separate forms, and particular details.  My real Self, my God-Self, sees All as Self, All with One meaning... Love and Wholeness, Innocence and Holiness, Truth and Beauty and endless Perfection... these are One and the same, All in All.

When people call with pressing illness or other urgent needs, I have learned to relax into this Allness, and allow It to tell me what is true.  Regardless of circumstance or appearance, God is the correction, fulfillment, healing, and supply... God is the real Life and Being of everyone and everything.  God is All in All.

"The Will of God is One, and all there is." -- A Course in Miracles; Manual for Teachers 20, 6:9

A Long Time Coming...

First, all links are working on the CD website, and I have also posted a new YouTube video.  Enjoy!  And don't forget to purchase mp3s or order the whole CD, and support the animals at The Claire Foundation Animal Sanctuary. 

All quotes today are from the Manual for Teachers in A Course in Miracles.  Where no reference is given, quotes are from section 10, "How is Judgment Relinquished?"

"And now must [you] attain a state that may remain impossible to reach for a long, long time.  [You] must learn to lay all judgment aside, and ask only what [you] really want in every circumstance." -- A Course in Miracles; Manual for Teachers 4, I, A, 7:7-8

Of course, time is an illusion.  What seems like a long time coming is just how it seems to us, as we cling to the remnants of personal judgment, guilt, and fear.  We cling to our personal judgments and conditioned self-image (which is nothing but a collection of judgments) because we think it is who we are... and it seems that giving up judgment would be the death of our identity and individuality.  In fact, the false identity keeps us blind to our true Self and individuality in God.

Every snowflake, every grain of sand is unique and individual... no two are ever the same.  And yet their only identity is in the collective.  A snowflake is nothing without the snowfall or the snowbank.  A single grain of sand is useless, but the sand dunes create shelter and habitat.  Each of us is unique, too, but not in the ways we imagine.  We each reflect God and only God in this world, each in a unique way that only has meaning within the Whole.  When we judge what we or anyone else should be, or what we should be doing or saying based on human perspectives (which are simply the memories we carry around as if they were true), we are projecting a false image over the face of Self... which is the face of Christ.

So how in the heck do we give up judgment?  How in the heck do we let go of who we think we are, or should be, or will be?  A Course in Miracles gives us clear direction:  "It is necessary... to realize not that he should not judge, but that he cannot.  In giving up judgment, he is merely giving up what he did not have.  He gives up the illusion; or better, he has an illusion of giving up.  He has actually become more honest.  Recognizing that judgment was always impossible [which of us could ever know or be aware of the full spectrum of possibilities or circumstances, past, present or future?], he no longer attempts it.  This is no sacrifice.  On the contrary, he puts himself in a position where judgment through him rather than by him can occur.  And this judgment [of the Holy Spirit] is neither 'good' nor 'bad'.  It is the only judgment there is, and it is only One: "God's Son is guiltless, and sin does not exist."     

Whenever we're confronted with decisions or problems, it may seem excruciatingly hard not to judge it 'practically'... but there is nothing practical about the world of suffering that arises from these false projections we call judgments.  Each of us will "lay it down happily the instant he recognizes the cost.  All of the ugliness he sees about him is its outcome.  All of the pain he looks upon is its result.  All of the loneliness and sense of loss; of passing time and growing hopelessness; of sickening despair and fear of death; all these have come of it [judgment].  And now he knows that these things need not be.  Not one is true.  For he has given up their cause, and they, which never were but the effects of his mistaken choice, have fallen from him.  Therefore lay judgment down, not with regret but with a sigh of gratitude.  Now are you free of a burden so great that you could merely stagger and fall down beneath it.  And it was all illusion.  Nothing more."

I am writing this blog today because giving up judgment has seemed to be a long time coming for me.  I thought I was a very judgmental person, even very recently.  I thought I had to struggle to somehow 'overcome' judgment.  But Grace has a way of correcting our false perceptions of ourselves in the unlikeliest of circumstances.  I am so grateful for every false judgment I ever thought I made... because I now know that it was all made up, including all self-judgment.  Every circumstance has become a happy dream, another way to remember God, and my Self.

"His sense of care is gone, for he has none.  He has given it away, along with judgment.  Now he makes no mistakes.  His Guide is sure.  And where before he came to judge, he comes to bless.  Where now he laughs, he used to come to weep." -- A Course in Miracles; Manual for Teachers 10, 5:7-13

Spiritual Paranoia

"Once you understand it is impossible that you be hurt except by your own thoughts, the fear of God must disappear.  You cannot then believe that fear is caused without [from outside your own mind]. And God, Whom you had thought to banish, can be welcomed back within the holy mind He never left." -- A Course in Miracles; Workbook Lesson 196, 8:3-5

Welcoming God back into the holy mind He[She] never left??  God is in my mind, and has always been????!!!!!????  These are very frightening thoughts to all of us.  For we find so much objectionable in our minds and thoughts... things we would never want anyone else to know about, much less God!  What is God, some kind of spirit lurking in the recesses of our minds, attempting to overtake us?  If God is IN our minds, then what is this other stuff???  And how can it be there if God is All, and everywhere and everything???

These thoughts, or something like them, arise in all our minds when we get too close to the Truth.  Our spiritual paranoia is such that we would rather die as weak and sinful mortals than acknowledge the grandeur of our true Being in God, as reflections and extensions of the Infinite.  We would rather live with the illusion that we are at the mercy of the world around us, that we are powerless and subject to all the laws the world evangelizes:  the laws of health, of diet, of economics, of 'nice' relationships and people, of judgment and punishment and guilt, of cause and effect as the material laws proclaim them.  As ACIM puts it, "The thing you dread the most is your salvation.  You have sought to be both weak and bound, because you feared your own strength and freedom.  Yet salvation lies in them." -- A Course in Miracles; Workbook Lesson 196, 9:4 & 7-8

This can be quite terrifying.  "When you realize once and for all that it is you that you fear, the mind perceives itself as split."  Both bondage and salvation, both in my own mind!  Yikes, what hope is there, then?  Won't it always be just this war of the worlds????

If we want to know the Truth enough to come this far, then it is easy to see the certainty of outcome.  The very nature of mental constructs and thought forms is that they are illusory... not real.  They are phantasms of the mind, as all fear is.  What is real is eternal and formless, and resides in the Mind of God, which extends ItSelf to all that Is, eternally whole and loving and calm, strong and free, infinite in Truth and in Being.  We are One with this Mind, and so sanity and Truth are in us, and we are always free to return to this Awareness of Self.  Or we can continue to make up scary stories and pretend to be bound by them.

So remember, when we find ourselves in the grip of such spiritual paranoia, it is a very good sign.  It means we are very close to reclaiming our power... to realizing that we are the terrorist, and the healer. 

"This is the only thing that you need do for vision, happiness, release from pain, and the complete escape from sin, all to be given you.  Say only this, but mean it with no reservations, for here the power of salvation lies:
          I am responsible for what I see.
          I choose the feelings I experience,
         And I decide upon the goal I would achieve.
         And everything that seems to happen to me, I ask for,
         And receive as I have asked.
Deceive yourself no longer that you are helpless in the face of what is done to you.  Acknowledge but that you have been mistaken, and all effects of your mistakes will disappear." -- A Course in Miracles; Chapter 21, Section II, 2:1-7

The Two Selves

In working with clients and with prayer requests (and with my own life) I have observed a persistent phenomenon that I will call the two selves.  This seems to be the delusion that all who walk the earth share.  We believe (and have a lot of sensory evidence to validate this belief) that we are human, weak, lacking, and subject to suffering.  At the same time, we believe we have infinite potential, that we are created in the image of the Divine.  So we all have a kind of split personality... there's the imaginary historical self that thinks we're a product of heredity and hierarchy and environment, that sees flaws in ourselves and every other living thing, that judges, criticizes, and condemns.  And there's the quiet true Self that loves and blesses, that takes joy in life, that gives of itself naturally and freely, that knows wholeness and freedom and love are all words for the same thing.

If you were suffering from multiple personalities, a good therapist would find a way to help you become unified again... because a house divided against itself cannot stand.  So spiritually, our task in healing and awakening is always a return to unified consciousness, to Oneness.  This is enlightenment... the realization that we are not two selves. 

To say we're created in the image of God is to perpetuate this split.  To say that we're a shadow, an image, a mere potential, is to put our becoming into the future, into perpetual process.  And where's the peace in that?  Where is the being?  If we are endlessly processing and becoming, we must still be incomplete, lacking in some way, still subject to suffering and failure.  This is the set-up we're born into.  It's a lose/lose proposition, and always has been.

There is good news.  We are not created in the image of a god... a mere shadowy image of some nebulous force that all are subject to.  We are living and moving and having our being in God, reflecting God, and nothing else.  Not a nebulous force that bosses us around, but the very Ground of our Being, and Source and Substance of Self.  There isn't anything but God. 

And what is God, my skeptical readers will ask?  GOD IS AN IDEA we share about the Source of all that is.  We can have false thoughts about this Source, but Source ItSelf can't be false.  We can have incorrect understanding of multiplication.  We might think that we can multiply ten thousand times a zero and still have ten thousand.  But the principle, the idea of multiplying anything with zero remains the same... it's always zero, no matter how you try to make it something else.  And anything multiplied by one always remains the same, remains itself.  Ideas are principles, and they are unchanging and true.  Thoughts are stories about ideas, they involve judgment, and can often be false, or at least only relative (two-sided, not unified).

Webster defines idea as "a transcendent entity that is a real pattern, of which existing things are imperfect representations."  Thought is defined as "the action or process of thinking, or something that is thought."  So we can say, as did Mary Baker Eddy, that GOD IS PRINCIPLE... the Idea that is the Ground of All Being, in Truth and in Love.  A Course in Miracles tells us that "God is Idea" and "Ideas leave not their Source." When we allow this transcendent Idea to take root, we realize that we cannot and have never left our Source.  We remain rooted and grounded in God.  And then our thoughts, our judgments and stories about the world begin to reflect the Truth of Being, rather than the weak and imperfect (and insubstantial!) image of self our stories have perpetuated up until now.   

We are not two selves.  This is the root of all our struggles.  No matter how we attempt to prove that our weak and human image of self is real, it's still multiplying by zero.  So take some time listen to the Real, the True, the God-Self that we all share.  It is very quiet, because It doesn't need to defend ItSelf, being wholly true and forever our Reality.  Thank God!