ACIM Lesson 249 Forgiveness ends all suffering and loss.
Forgiveness ends all suffering and loss.
Lesson 249
Forgiveness ends all suffering and loss.
1. Forgiveness paints a picture of a world where suffering is over, loss becomes impossible and anger makes no sense. ²Attack is gone, and madness has an end. ³What suffering is now conceivable? ⁴What loss can be sustained? ⁵The world becomes a place of joy, abundance, charity and endless giving. ⁶It is now so like to Heaven that it quickly is transformed into the light that it reflects. ⁷And so the journey which the Son of God began has ended in the light from which he came.
2. Father, we would return our minds to You. ²We have betrayed them, held them in a vise of bitterness, and frightened them with thoughts of violence and death. ³Now would we rest again in You, as You created us.
I was talking with a group today about forgiveness.
What I have discovered about forgiveness is that it is always about forgiving my thoughts. For instance, in reading the news, I might have the thought that what we need is more compassion in the world. This is, in effect, saying that some people are guilty of not acting compassionately. I would be saying that I have a grievance against these people, and this is an attack on them. It is an attack even if the thought never becomes verbal and even if it is not directed against a particular person.
What I would do about that if it were the thought in my mind is to withdraw it from where I think I see it and look for it in my own mind. Have I ever acted without compassion? Well, clearly, it would be that I was not being compassionate toward these people I read about. They are doing their best right now from the perspective of their present beliefs. They need and deserve my compassion for where they are. If I am not feeling compassion, and certainly I am not if I am judging them, then I can forgive my thoughts about this and forgive the idea that they must change for me to be at peace.
In Lesson 73, Jesus talks about idle wishes and grievances.
2. Idle wishes and grievances are partners or co-makers in picturing the world you see. ²The wishes of the ego gave rise to it, and the ego’s need for grievances, which are necessary to maintain it, peoples it with figures that seem to attack you and call for “righteous” judgment. ³These figures become the middlemen the ego employs to traffic in grievances. ⁴They stand between your awareness and your brothers’ reality. ⁵Beholding them, you do not know your brothers or your Self.
3. Your will is lost to you in this strange bartering, in which guilt is traded back and forth, and grievances increase with each exchange.
I am ready to stop bartering guilt. I am ready to end all suffering and loss through forgiveness. There is no judgment, attack thought, or grievance that is so important to me that I would trade my happiness and my peace of mind to keep it. Sure, they come into my mind as idle wishes, but I remember that, in reality, there are no idle wishes. All thoughts produce form at some level, so as soon as I notice one, I forgive it. I am so grateful for the healing power of forgiveness. It has changed my experience of this life.
All suffering begins with thought, and all suffering ends when thought is forgiven.
Even when I forgive someone else, I only forgive my thoughts about that one, and thus, I am only forgiving myself. Jesus redefines the word forgiveness in the Course, which holds nothing in common with the more familiar definition. In my mind, I substitute the word undoing for forgiveness.
I am undoing the idea that there is anything to forgive as I forgive the idea that anything outside the mind exists. Since there is nothing outside, what is it that is seen as a threat? Did someone attack me if there is no one to do the attacking?
I am undoing the ego. Once the ego is undone, I need do nothing to regain paradise. Love doesn’t need anything from me to be Itself. Once the ego has been undone within the mind of the Son, paradise lost becomes paradise found without further effort, and the cycle is complete. Our imagined world is then “now so like to Heaven that it quickly is transformed into the light that it reflects.”
My part in this process is to forgive all things.
Since these things (people or situations) are projections from the mind I am a part of, I am always undoing the (ego) mind. Someone says something upsetting to me, and I undo the idea that someone “else” has upset me. There is no one separate from me. There is only another aspect of my Self and my upset is only my perception of words said.
This is why I often ask for another way to see a new perception that is closer to reality than the ego perception I currently hold. In this way, I undo another bit of ego thinking. It seems like a slow and tedious process when looked at, but I trust the Atonement, which was designed on a far higher level than that in which I find myself at this time. We did this, and we must undo it; forgiveness is how we do that.
Regina’s Tips on What is the World?
Our special theme says, “Let us not be satisfied until forgiveness has been made complete. And let us not attempt to change our function. … what was made to die can be restored to everlasting life.”
With these words, our special theme encourages us to stay with our spiritual practice until the final end of the ego.
How do we know when the ego has reached its final end?
Our special theme says that in truth “all the world must disappear.”
My Thoughts
I used to argue with that. I evidently found the idea of our miscreation disappearing to be upsetting. That was because I still thought of myself as a human being and the world as my home. As a human being, I was limited and could not imagine anything better. I couldn’t imagine myself as the Eternal Creator. In fact, there was this idea in my mind that I would be without purpose and bored if I returned to my natural state.
I don’t have any memory at all of what it is like to exist as part of God. But I no longer labor under the misapprehension that it is a limited state. Or that it would be less than what I am now. I no longer worry about this sandcastle we have built in the mind and no longer feel protective of it. It does not exist now nor ever existed, so what is there to lose? All that I am doing is learning that I no longer want to hold onto the thought of a world.
There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. Not everyone is ready to accept it, and each one must go as far as he can let himself be led along the road to truth. He will return and go still farther, or perhaps step back a while and then return again. ~ A Course in Miracles, Lesson 132
Regina’s Tips on the lesson
Letting go of I-thought thinking takes us from a dream of suffering to a dream of joy, but that is not yet the end of the I-thought. If we stop our spiritual practice upon reaching this threshold, we can experience a reemergence of the ego thought system.
It is in our best interest to welcome the happy dream as an opportunity to continue our spiritual practice without distraction until we find ourselves ushered across the threshold, through the experience of the ego’s final end, to “Beauty that cannot be contained in illusion.”
My Thoughts
So, upon awakening in the world, we find that we are not finished yet. There is further to go. I have seen that in those people I know personally who have awakened. They continue to meditate, and in fact, they increase their meditation. They see more than I do now, and their peace and happiness is uninterrupted. But I have seen that they also continue to grow into their awakening, as will I.
We must not underestimate the importance of forgiveness.
Forgiveness is a train I board to go Home. The tracks lead directly to God; all I need to do is get on. When I fail to forgive or choose ego over Spirit as my teacher, I have fallen off the train and so am no longer on the most direct route home. I have to get up, shake myself off, and get right back on. Forgiveness isn’t just something I do as a “spiritual person anymore. It is not my little sacrifice to God where I give up what I want for the good of the Sonship.
Forgiveness is my joy, my happiness, my peace. Forgiveness is the purpose of everything that appears in my life, anywhere in my life, even in the peripheral parts of my life. If it is in any way in my awareness, I ask the Holy Spirit what needs to be done with this. What in this event, person, or circumstance needs my forgiveness? Every forgiveness is inclusive. I forgive myself, the other person, event, or circumstance. I forgive the world that is part of this lesson and the Sonship that is dreaming this dream. Forgiveness is my function until there is nothing in the mind that doesn’t reflect God.
Contemplation 2025
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Dear Myron, thank you for such eloquent teachings.